Purely in the narrow terms that you put forward, you may be right that the Israeli occupation of Palestine gets too much attention. Many more people have died (for example) in the Congolese civil war.

However, if you take a wider view and look at the amount of death and oppression that has resulted in the region as a whole, because of the conflict, then you start to see why it gets so much attention.

For example, you mention oil. It's true that Israel/Palestine does not have oil resources, but it's also true that since Israel became a US client in the late 60s, it's been treated very much as a "local cop on the beat" (Kissenger) for the region as a whole, a regional enforcer for the superpower - which is the most oil rich region in the world. While Israel likes to portray itself as the beseiged victim against a hostile Arab world, and Israelis are brought up to believe in this seige mentality, you only need to look at the amount of "interventions" Israel has made in surrounding (and far away) countries over the years to see why people around the world are pissed off at Israel.

When it comes down to it, the reason the Palestinians get so much international support is because they have worked their arses off to raise it (and the fact that they deserve the support). The first intifada especially led to a much greater awareness of the Palestinian identity.

And you're wrong that most Christians don't bother about holy places. Your comment might hold some water if you were only talking about Christians in the western world, though.

The simple reason for all the disproportionate attention on our little corner of the world is:
"Jews is News".

The world can't get over itself that the Jews have finally had enough of being the world's punching bag and not only has its own country, but - gasp - has the temerity to defend itself.

There's your answer.

Given that Palestine is Al Qaeda's number one recruitment theme (i.e. reflecting the already present anger as the US support for an illegal occupation) what would you consider to be proportionate coverage?

I don't get the point of your psoting. It appears to be a rhetorical question (statement). could you rephrase it.

Christianity is all but outside the 3rd World and the US.

An obsession with Jews which is all to apparant in the pompous writings of the left and the rantings of the right.

The extreme left and the extreme right meet full circle in their unquenchable obsession with Jews.

The left, as can be seen from the postings on this site, quite simply are sickened that Jews have a country where the word 'Jew' is not a slander, where we are protected by Jewish soldiers, rather than being dependant on the goodwill of other nations and always afraid that those nations will turn.

Were it not for the State of Israel, the Jewish religion in the former soviet block would have been wiped out, as would Judaism in Etheopia and the Sudan.

These Jews were rescued by the State and in this country we try to live in security. We have made peace with whoever will make peace with us and will continue to do so.

However the thought of Jews not suffering is too much for so many.

An obsession with Jews which is all to apparant in the pompous writings of the left and the rantings of the right.

The extreme left and the extreme right meet full circle in their unquenchable obsession with Jews.

The left, as can be seen from the postings on this site, quite simply are sickened that Jews have a country where the word 'Jew' is not a slander, where we are protected by Jewish soldiers, rather than being dependant on the goodwill of other nations and always afraid that those nations will turn.

Were it not for the State of Israel, the Jewish religion in the former soviet block would have been wiped out, as would Judaism in Etheopia and the Sudan.

These Jews were rescued by the State and in this country we try to live in security. We have made peace with whoever will make peace with us and will continue to do so.

However the thought of Jews not suffering is too much for so many.

The reason the Israel/Palestine region gets so much attention is because the left are thick. Most people in the left wing movements haven't even heard of the Congolese civil war, war in Kashmir or the Punjab. Or even the civil war in Dafur in Sudan. They are too thick and lazy to find out about and study world conflicts. But the Israel Palestine conflict is in the news all the time so the left make a big fuss about it.

The Israeli view of peace seems to be different than other peoples. The last 38 years they have occupied the west bank and Gaza and bulldozed houses shot Palestinains of all ages and stolen their land and then they wonder why in 1994 they started fighting back with suicide bombers the last desperate act of an oppressed people. In the five years of the present "Intifada" 3 times as many Palestinians as Jews have been killed why because the Jewish State is equiped with the most up to date weapons which are given to them by the USA(so called peacebroker) and lets not forget they use Helicopter gunships to target so called Terrorists and kill innocent civilians standing anywhere near. Then they wonder why these people's relatives want revenge. Also they are now building a wall which cuts Palestinian towns and Villages in half and steals more land. Finally lets not forget they are the only nuclear powere in the region thanks to the UK Government.

Perhaps 'adrian cannon' might like to explain how the 1967 occupations took place. Did Israel wake up one morning and decide 'let's occupy some territory' and launch a surprise attack on its bewildered neighbors?

In reply to your Question Israel marched into the west bank and Gaza after being attacked neighbouring nations but i guess you already know that, but if we're going to be pedantic why did these countries attack could it be the previous 19 years of mistreatment and expulsionn of Palestinians from their homeland. If you have any more points to make how about using your real name and not a pseudonym then I will know who you are

The demands of the PLO, and endorsed by the UN, are for Israel to retreat to its pre-1967 borders - not for the total destruction of the State of Israel. If 'Adrian Cannon' has more extreme demands to frustrate the prospect of peace, he should make them known.

Al Qaeda aren't bombing our cities because of the Congolese war, that's why. And we aren't fighting a war in the middle-east for the interests of the Sudanese. It used to be South Africa was the big story, because of our close link to that government, even though there were even worse things than apartheid happening in the world. Now Israel and Palestine is a focus, because of our close links to the Israeli government and our support of another apartheid. And in this instance, we are even being drawn into this ridiculous 'war on terror' as a consequence. No other foreign conflict in the world affects us in such a way, even though there are worse conflicts. The fact is, we are involved, and as brits we have been involved from the veyr beginning, when we promised the land of the Palestinians to the Jews, without having any right to do so.

Can you read? Nowhere in my comments did I make any demands but tried to explain the history of the conflict but as the paranoid Zionist you must be you can not stand the historical truth to come out. If I have any demands it is for a one state solution where Jews and Palestinians live in peace together but this will never come about as long as Israel always pretends to be the victim and does not face up to the truth that it is at least 50% responsible for the problem. Why do you still hide behind your pseudonym?

Can someone explain why there was absolutely no pressure from the left to create a Palestinian State during the time that the West Bank and Gaza Strip was occupied by the Jordanians and the Jordanians killed about 8 times as many Palestinians as the Israelis have done?

For 19 years these states were in occupation and the left stayed silent.

I can think of a good reason, possibly it is because the land was not controlled by Jews.

There are plenty of Jews who are also on "the left", arsehole. Don't let your chip-on-shoulder paranoia blind you to the obvious reality that there is a lot more to the problems in Israel/Palestine than simple-minded ethinicity.

Most lefties don't care whether people are Jewish, Arab or whatever. Sorry to shatter your "its all about me" bubble. What they do care about is injustice, slaughter and oppression.

Or do you think that Israel alone should be allowed to ignore UN resolutions? Iraq wasn't allowed to.

"paranoid Zionist you must be you can not stand the historical truth to come out"

I am neither paranoid nor a Zionist. I simply challenged your initial suggestion that the 1967 war was one of aggression to gain more land, when it was one of defence. You also neglect to mention that Gaza was occupied by Egypt, The West Bank by Jordan and the Golan Heights by Syria (who also occupied Lebanon, not that anyone complained). So the sugestion that the Israelis went and land-grabbed more territory from _The Palestinians_ in 1967 is patently false. The territories were occupied by non-Palestinians before 1967. In fact, some early PLO action was against the Jordanian government against its occupation. Jordan claimed the West Bank as its own until the late 1980s.

Now, that doesn't excuse Israel's current occupation. But with the evacuation of Gaza, things are starting to move in a more positive direction. Let's hope things keep moving forward.

But shrill and reductionist shouting Israel=bad everyone else=good won't sort out the problems.

Your even more immature reductionism seems to hold that since you are anti-Zionist, anyone who dares to challenge you, or correct you, must be pro-Zionist. The world is not so binary.

Separating between facts and propaganda - even when it is inconvenient - is what progressive politics is about.

Ignoring your rude tone, you never answered my question. If you care so much for the Palestinian people, then answer it.

I repeat:-

Can someone explain why there was absolutely no pressure from the left to create a Palestinian State during the time that the West Bank and Gaza Strip was occupied by the Jordanians and the Jordanians killed about 8 times as many Palestinians as the Israelis have done?

Furthermore if the extreme left hate killing and oppression so much, why do they not protest at the Arab backed slaughter in the Sudan, civil wars in Africa, the occupation of Kashmir, the occupation of Tibet.

I hear what Hermes said, but simply because these other conflicts do not have repercussions in the UK does not mean that they should be ignored. Israel has not ignored them and has offered and provided support to the Sudanese, victims of Hutu slaughter, Tsunami victims, terror victims in Beslan and has taught farming skills throughout Africa to assist in making desserts blooom.

Israel is a democracy - the only one in the Middle East - of course it has problems, far less than a country its age would usually have, and of course it should be criticised, but the disproportionate amount of criticism Israel faces is wrong.

Iraq faced less criticism for gassing 80,000 men women and children, the slaughter in Darfur receives less attention.

I can only think of one reason why.

And that from the extreme left who have been responsible for more human rights abuses and deaths than anyone else.

J&P...I thought the extreme right were responsible for more deaths and human rights abuses than anybody else, or do you so easily forget the holocaust.

The left weren't responsible for the 2 world wars. That was solely the fault of right wing imperialism, in both cases. They never used the atom bomb on anybody. There was a lot of internal oppression in communist countries, but with the exception of Afghanistan, which eventually undid the soviet union, there were no wars of imperial aggression. The US in Vietnam were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Actually, I didn't take Tibet into account. Of course, the Chinese had no right to invade there and destroy their culture and lives, but they have a slightly better claim for being there ( the idea it was once part of China ) than, for example, the US in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Panama, Nicaragua, Colombia, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Korea.
China interferes with Taiwan. The US is currently interfering in almost every country in the world, with militiary bases in countries nowhere near it's borders.

Seriously, taking into account the world wars, just who has been responsible for the most misery in this world, western imperialism or soviet style communism. And I am not a soviet style communist, in any case. I am living and working in Venezuela now. The situation in Latin America and the emerging new socialism is a far bigger obsession for me than Israel-Palestine.

In fact, maybe I should stop caring about the Palestine situation, since noone is going to bomb Caracas over the middle-east situation, and the worse the situation in the middle-east becomes, the better becomes the situation of Venezuela which is booming because of high oil prices. But I have all my family in the UK, and I want to visit occassionally, and I don't like these reports of bombs in London and police walking around with machine guns. Things have become pretty fucked up, and there is a direct link from that situation to the situation in Israel-Palestine.

I think activists care about this situation, because it is one which we can have a direct impact on, rather than Tibet, or Africa. There was a lot of focus among the left about Indonesia and East Timor, because we sold the Indonesians weapons. And there was a big outcry among the left during the time Saddam was fighting Iran as our friendly dictator, and using the gas we sold him to gas the Kurds, so it's a lie to say the left didn't care. It's a question of what conflicts are we involved in, because if you're pragmatic, you have to realise those are the only ones you can really affect.

In fact, the left is deeply concerned with the situation in Africa, but not on the simple superficial level, in sending money to aid organisations which hardly seem to make any real difference, but on the most profound level, in trying to cancel the debt, and get rid of unfair trade rules. The protestors at the G8 weren't protesting about Israel-Palestine, it was about the developing world, because the roots of many African conflicts lie in the extreme debt and poverty they have. It is all fine and well sending some money to Africa to build wells and shelters, but that doesn't even scratch the surface....the whole system of trade needs to be changed. That's why the people in Indymedia don't focus on individual conflicts in Africa as much as they focus on the G8. Because in getting our leaders to change those trade rules, the situation in Africa will be more profoundly improved.

So you can see, left-wing activists are pragmatists, and their focus is on areas they can affect real change. And that is in pressuring our leaders about their militiary policy in the middle-east ( of which Israel is a big part ), and about their trade policy in the rest of the world. We can shout about Tibet all we like, but there is nothing the US or Britain can realistically do to improve that situation, and the Chinese aren't going to listen to us, only to the actions of their own people. The best we can do is to be a good example. Sadly, we are not a good example. We wage illegal wars, expoit the third world, and torture people without giving them the benefit of a fair trial even. So the Chinese aren't especially won't give what we say much notice, when it stinks of hypocrisy.

And so seriously, it is not about Jewish. If there was genuinely a piece of land that was empty and fertile, then great if the Jewish people could move there and build a state. And you know, Israel is a great country, except for the fact of what it is doing to the Palestinians. I have been there. I like the people ( when they're not in their army uniforms shouting at me that is ), I like the architecture and the food and the women ( like the amazons who check your passports and question you ). I like the sense of solidarity the people have with each other. But I do not like what is happening to the Palestinians, and the sense of denial and defensiveness of the Israelis. The land was not empty, and the people were displaced and dispossessed by the Jews. It is a fundamental injustice and humiliation, and it continues until now. It is based upon an antiquated nationalist ideology, of the sort which started the various world wars, which should be left behind for a universalist ideology.

We all have to learn to live together, and even if the jews have their own state, they are still at the mercy of others, namely the good will of the US at the moment. The jews will always be a minority. Maybe not within their own country, but within the world. There will always be some bigger power ready to take the land if it suits them, like the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans of the past. Better to find some way to integrate and live together with the Palestinians as one, than always looking for a way to seperate yourself and divide yourself.

OK, end of big post....

You make a fair point about the suffering caused by the right - however my point was simply that tens of millions of deaths in the former Soviet Bloc and China under socialist/communist regimes hardly bears ignoring - the extreme left have been responsible for a copious amonut of suffering whichg cannot be excused.

Even in the new systems emerging in South America, people are suffering on a daily basis.

To clarify a couple of points:-

"And so seriously, it is not about Jewish. If there was genuinely a piece of land that was empty and fertile, then great if the Jewish people could move there and build a state."

The land which was the subject of the Partition agreement (before the 1948 war) was not 'stolen' it was purchased by Jews from absentee Turkish landowners and was very infertile. Swaps were cleared and desserts irrigated it was turned into farmland which was repeatedly raided by Arab tribes.


"And you know, Israel is a great country, except for the fact of what it is doing to the Palestinians. I have been there. I like the people ( when they're not in their army uniforms shouting at me that is ), I like the architecture and the food and the women ( like the amazons who check your passports and question you ). "

I agree - except the soldiers are also people and you should realise this - they are conscripts facing hostility from neighbours who wish to wipe them and their families out - so of course they do not suffer people taking the security situation lightly. The women , yes you are right ..... In fact I got me one of those.


"But I do not like what is happening to the Palestinians"

You may have noticed that Gaza is being evicted as we speak - if Arafat would have accepted the deal with Barak there would now be a viable Palestinian State alongside Israel.
Do you think Israel is wholly to blame; or the corrupt Palestinian leadership?

Yes you make some valid points but your tone was one of hostility to what I was saying and the fact that you used a pseudonym did not help. With reference to gaza the settlers have left but not the troops and their is the fact of the wall on the west bank which is splitting communities and enclosing Palestinian land on the Israeli side.

I saw two young settler girls in Gaza interviewed on C4 news last night - they were no older than 11.

One of them said that she thought the Arabs might have a point, but didn't care because Gaza belonged to the Jewish people "by right of conquest."

Do these people not realise that this is EXACTLY the sort of language and justification used by the Nazi Third Reich?

Or do they not care? Every Jew who understands history should be ashamed that Israel's children could hold such fascist views.

Jewish and Sad; what do you think Arab kids say about Jews?

Have you not heard about what is in their textbooks, have you not heard what they sing about?

Wiping Jews of the face of the earth is not an uncommon theme. Does that not sound like Nazi language.


Hermes - please consider this article in Haaretz 17.08.05:-


Point of View /Bad guys, fall guys

By Israel Harel

Hundreds of important journalists from the top flight of the world media postponed their summer vacation and are pouring into Israel. Apparently the Holy Land has again become the most important place in the world in terms of the creation of news - otherwise the journalists would certainly not cancel their vacations. Hundreds of other journalists have already been here for many weeks and are boning up on the subject "in depth." And they are joined, of course, by the hundreds of foreign correspondents who are based permanently in Israel in numbers that exceed, in absolute - not only relative - terms the volume of foreign correspondents based in places where the world's fate is decided. The Israeli Government Press Office says that when the disengagement begins to be implemented in practice, there will be more than 6,000 foreign correspondents here.

In large parts of Africa, such as Niger, hundreds of thousands of people are dying of starvation and disease. However, as befits such an unimportant event, only a handful of journalists from around the world are there, in the form of a kind of "pool," in order to tell us about the horrors that are occurring on a continent which even God seems to want to forget. And, it turns out, humanity, too. Otherwise, humanity would send its representatives, the journalists, to report to them, to remind them incessantly, to rouse the world's conscience. The same pattern can be seen in Sudan and Algeria. There, the death of hundreds of thousands of people from starvation or AIDS is not a big story. In Sudan, the Christians are undergoing genocide, yet the Christian world, for some reason, is not displaying signs of shock. In Algeria, thousands of villagers, if not more, have been the victims of massacres for years. Yet only a few journalists visit those places, and they, too, go there only for a single assignment.

Not so in Israel, the place where the true news of the world is always created, but especially now, and where it is impossible to rely only on the foreign correspondents who are based here permanently. To cover the disengagement - that almost cosmic drama being played out between the Sons of Light, namely the good Israelis who have the best interests of the Palestinians at heart, and the Sons of Darkness, namely the settlers - reinforcements in the form of top correspondents are needed.




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Only they will be able to describe how Ariel Sharon, the leader of the Sons of Light - and the current darling of the liberal world - is standing at the head of the front to uproot the obscurantist, cruel settlers. And when this is the story, how can the suffering in Africa or North Korea or Afghanistan or Chechnya be compared to this drama, whose goal is to do justice to the Palestinians?

Because after all, the Palestinians, more than any other group of people in the world (okay, except for the Jews) interest the world media. When it comes to Palestinian suffering - and such suffering does, of course, exist - the journalistic rules of the game acquire a distinctive bias, in accordance, of course, with the journalists' professional values.

Palestinians who are delayed at an Israeli checkpoint - in order to avert a suicide bombing attack - are a far more interesting subject, and broadcast more frequently, than images of victims of massacres in Sudan or Algeria. Tear gas fired by Jewish soldiers at Palestinian demonstrators who are against the separation fence is broadcast almost every day by every important media outlet in the West, whereas executions of women in Saudi Arabia after they have been accused of adultery (generally without trial), or cutting off limbs of people accused of theft, is not headline news.

And what is the value of all the world events, including even those in Iraq, as compared to the expected scenes of the uprooting of the Jews of Gush Katif from their homes? How can the world's journalists, and the editors who sent them, not be moved by the historic precedent in which a Jewish minister of defense invites them to a Jewish training camp where tens of thousands of Jewish soldiers are training to expel 8,000 Jewish settlers from their homes? They watch the exercise together with the Jewish chief of staff and nearly the entire general staff of the Jewish army. And they are impressed by their hosts' unconcealed pleasure at the success of the exercise - in which Jewish soldiers are able to overcome the bad settlers who refuse to understand that for the sake of peace, which will, after all, arrive on the day after the evacuation, they must make this tiny sacrifice.

Some of the journalists who arrived early visited me for background talks - someone must have told them that quite a few of the settlements earmarked for uprooting were established in the period when I was head of the Yesha Council of settlements - and I have to note that none of them was able to explain convincingly the source of this tremendous interest in an event which, with all its internal Israeli intensity, is quite marginal in terms of any world criterion or any news criterion. Because, after all, they know as well as anyone else that there will not be a civil war here; that the government of Ariel Sharon will not fall; and that the army, despite the large number of officers who live in settlements, will not revolt.

What, then, is the story? Which carcasses will the media vultures swoop down on and what do the news organizations expect that makes it worth their while to spend so much money and have their representatives live in the difficult conditions of the Negev desert at the hottest time of the year, not to mention the dangers they face in the form of Qassam rockets or roadside ambushes?

For more than a generation, the settlers have been painted in the blackest colors possible. Certainly even blacker than the Palestinian suicide bombers, more bloodthirsty than Al-Qaida, and more brutal than the liquidators in Chechnya, Sudan or Iraq. And now, when the time for sweet revenge has arrived - and when their own people are those who are executing the revenge - the media has arrived en masse to document the fall of the bad guys.

The international community, which has been so conditioned to hate the settlers, will take pleasure in the images that will be photographed, by more than 3,000 professional cameramen, of what may turn out to be the start of the uprooting of the entire Zionist dream, the cardinal tenet of which is Jewish settlement in every part of the Land of Israel. What could be more interesting in this drama than the Jewish myth uprooting itself, as the Jews shatter the formative narrative of their national movement, which is based primarily on settlement? Perhaps this uprooting hints at the beginning of the end of what was done here in the past 120 years.

There is an almost seminal change in the fact that it is not Europeans and Arabs who are expelling Jews, as was the case in the past, but the Jews who are expelling themselves. And the journalists, the descendants of those former expellers, will be here to document the present, advanced stage of the expulsion of Jews (when it seemed that such acts belonged to the dark ages of history).

It is not every day that history summons up a precedent-setting spectacle of this kind, in which Jews expel Jews and thereby declare implicitly that what the Europeans did to them in the past was not so terrible. For the fact is that they themselves, in their own land, are capable of doing it to themselves.

"Jewish and Sad; what do you think Arab kids say about Jews?"

I don't fucking care. What are you, five years old? If someone says or does something bad, it does not justify doing something as bad yourself.

It is you who bleats on about the Jews needing Israel after the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust.

My point is : do you really understand WHY the Holocaust was so horrific? Would you care so much if it had not been targeted at the Jews? You appear not to place as high a value on other lives.

For decency's sake, 11-year-old Jewish girls acting like good little Nazi ideologues in support of Israel is something that we SHOULD NEVER support - no matter how many Arabs are rude about the people (who stole their land and butchered their children.)

I despair.

"Al Qaeda aren't bombing our cities because of the Congolese war, that's why. And we aren't fighting a war in the middle-east for the interests of the Sudanese"

So just because Al Queda arent bombing London because of the Congolese war does it not matter? Do the lives of Congolese and Sudanese mean less than the lives of Palestinians or Israelis just because the conflict has not strayed over here?

What a selfish point of view.


6000 Journalists were in Gaza for the pull out - about 2 were in Congo and a handful in Sudan