"[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat."
-- Yitzhak Rabin (a "Prince of Peace" by Clinton's standards), explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry. (Quoted in David Shipler in the New York Times, 04/04/1983 citing Meir Cohen's remarks to the Knesset's foreign affairs and defense committee on March 16.)

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!"
-- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country."
-- David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.


"If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?"
David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.

The Racism of Minister Atias
Israel Calls on Ultra-Orthodox Jews to Stop "Arab Takeover"

By JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth.

Israel’s housing minister called for strict segregation between the country’s Jewish and Arab populations last week as he unveiled plans to move large numbers of fundamentalist religious Jews to Israel’s north to prevent what he described as an “Arab takeover” of the region.

Ariel Atias said he considered it a “national mission” to bring ultra-Orthodox Jews -- or Haredim, distinctive for their formal black and white clothing -- into Arab areas, and announced that he would also create the north’s first exclusively Haredi town.

The new settlement drive, according to Mr Atias, is intended to revive previous failed efforts by the state to “Judaize”, or create a Jewish majority in, the country’s heavily Arab north.

Analysts say the announcement is a disturbing indication that the Haredim, who have traditionally been hostile to Zionism because of their strict reading of the Bible, are rapidly being recruited to the Judaization project in both Israel and the occupied territories.

Mr Atias, of the ultra-Orthodox party Shas, is drawing on a model already successfully developed over the past decade in the West Bank, where the Haredim, the group with the highest birth rate in Israel, have been encouraged to move into separate settlements that have rapidly eaten into large chunks of Palestinian territory.

Several mayors of northern cities in Israel have appealed to Mr Atias to help them “save” the Jewishness of their communities in a similar manner by recruiting Haredim to swell the numbers of Jews in the north.

Mr Atias revealed his new drive on Thursday as he spoke at an Israeli Bar Association conference in Tel Aviv to discuss land reform plans. He told the delegates: “We can all be bleeding hearts, but I think it is unsuitable [for Jews and Arabs] to live together.”

His priority, he said, was to prevent the “spread” of Arab citizens, who comprise one-fifth of the country’s population and are mostly restricted to their own overcrowded communities in two northern regions, the Galilee and Wadi Ara.

Referring to the Galilee, where Arab citizens are a small majority of the population, he said: “If we go on like we have until now, we will lose the Galilee. Populations that should not mix are spreading there.”

Mr Atias also revealed that mayors of several northern cities where Arab citizens had started to move into Jewish neighbourhoods had asked him how they could “salvage” their cities.

One, Shimon Lankry, the mayor of Acre, where there were intercommunal clashes last year, met with the minister only last week. “He told me ‘Bring a bunch of Haredim and we’ll save the city’,” Mr Atias said.

“He told me that Arabs are living in Jewish buildings and running them [Jews] out.”

The Haredim have a birth rate -- estimated at eight children per woman -- that is twice that of the Muslim population and are increasingly seen as a useful demographic weapon to stop the erosion of Israel’s Jewish majority.

Mr Atias’s comments brought swift condemnation from Israel’s Arab lawmakers. Mohammad Barakeh, the head of the Communist Party, told the popular Israeli website Ynet: “Racism is spreading throughout the government and Minister Atias is the latest to express it.”

The key initiative proposed by Mr Atias is the development of a large Haredi town of 20,000 homes based on an existing small community at Harish in the Wadi Ara, a region close to the West Bank.

Harish was established in the early 1990s by the housing minister of the time, Ariel Sharon, as part of a huge settlement drive inside both Israel and the occupied territories.

Harish and a dozen communities known as “star points” were built on the Green Line -- the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank -- as a way to erode its political significance.

Most of the communities, however, were located in densely populated Arab areas and failed to attract Israelis.

Until recently the settler population had spurned settling in Israel and has been drawn instead either to Palestinian areas close to Jerusalem or to frontier communities deep in the West Bank.

Cesar Yehudkin of Bimkom, a group of Israeli town planners critical of government planning policy, said the goal of Harish was to occupy a large swathe of land in Wadi Ara to prevent the “natural growth” of Arab localities. “Harish is an attractive option for rapid development because the infrastructure for a large town is already in place,” he said.

Mr Atias told Israel’s Bar Association that Harish was a vital way to stop “illegal Arab expansion” and that the Haredim “are the only ones willing to live there”.

The Israeli media revealed two weeks ago similar plans by Shimon Gapso, the mayor of Upper Nazareth, a Jewish town established 50 years ago in the Galilee region to restrict the growth of the neighbouring Arab city of Nazareth.

He announced that 3,000 homes are to be built next year for the Haredim to increase Jewish dominance of the city, which has seen a steady migration of Arabs from Nazareth and its surrounding villages desperate for a place to live.

Tight planning restrictions on Arab communities mean that there are few places for Arab citizens to build legally and they are excluded from hundreds of Jewish rural communities through vetting committees, Mr Yehudkin said.

Mr Gapso, who is identified with the Yisrael Beiteinu Party of the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has complained about the “demographic threat” posed by Arabs moving into Upper Nazareth.

He recently told the Israeli media: “As a man of Greater Israel, I think it more important to settle the Galilee than Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] … I urge the settlers to come here.”

Some 600 ultra-Orthodox families have already signed up to live in the new Upper Nazareth neighbourhood, which has the backing of Eli Yishai, the interior minister and leader of Shas.

In a related Judaization drive, Nefesh B’Nefesh, one of the main organisations bringing Jewish immigrants to Israel, announced in December a programme to offer financial incentives to new immigrants to settle in northern Israel.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

Cynthia McKinney
Infowars
July 6, 2009

This is Cynthia McKinney and I’m speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies – and even crayons for children; I had a suitcase full of crayons for children.
featured stories Cynthia McKinney: Letter from an Israeli Jail
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I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza’s children could color and paint, that Gaza’s wounded could be healed, and that Gaza’s bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.


While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis highjacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.

At the outbreak of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead [in December 2008], I boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day’s notice and tried, as the US representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver three tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.

During Operation Cast Lead, US-supplied F-16s rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full-scale, outright genocide. US-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs – new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel’s onslaught that Gaza had become Israel’s veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.

The world saw Israel’s despicable violence thanks to Al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water… It’s a miracle that I’m even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.

The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime… I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons to kids?

Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else’s children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza’s children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.

I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza’s children could color and paint, that Gaza’s wounded could be healed, and that Gaza’s bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.

But I’ve learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it’s incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream… like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better… The once proud, never-colonized Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than human rights and self-determination.

My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn’t cheap. Many of them represent their family’s best collective efforts for self-fulfilment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel, only after they arrived Israel told them, “There is no UN in Israel.”


The police here have license to pick them up and suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world’s first Jews and Christians. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.

The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle’s detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for six months. As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and “yes we can” were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfilment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed in.

It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel’s marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.

We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to [write one]. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the US have a lot to atone for, for what they’ve done to others around the world.

What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people’s children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I’m experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. [But] I’m lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?

Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:] What are you willing to do?

Let’s change the world together and reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State’s Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.

I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I’ve met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.