i would like to invite everybody to read the contributions
on this page. In my opinion there are only two of them
trying to present a rational analysis of facts and
emotions (as opposed to just showing emotions). Sadly
enough, some others are angry at these when learning that
there might be something wrong with their political weltbild
belief.

What do you think?

to openDemocracy: is there any reason that my posts are banned here? deteodoru's post, above, includes a series of expressions that directly presenting his opinion that the Jewish State and the Jews are identical with the Nazis. He is entitled to every opinion, but why do you block my respond? Is this the way to express open democracy?

Note from moderator:

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 BigC

to the honorable Daniel E. Teodoru. I wonder why should an inteligent and skillful wirter like you spend so many words, when you could make it much shorter by wirting this single word: Zionazi.
You've made your point so clear, that all your post is a pile of wasted words.
BTW: how long have you been shelled and bombed? A day? Two days? You liked it?
We are here to stay forever, whether or not you and the peaceloving Palestinians like it.

look at Iron Mike's comment (above), before you point at us. nobody here likes the Gaza BLOODY story. but to all of you, Hypocrites: were where you during the last 8 years of bombing and shelling and rocketing? We forcedly evacuated thousands of civilians out of Gaza strip, exactly as the Palestinians demanded, and under the (false) hope that they will stop, and many of these are still homeless. THE HAMAS NEVER STOPPED!
Sane leaders do not hide behind women and children. Hamas "leaders" do, because they know that when their living shield is hurt and killed, they "gain" the world public opinion. We are not surprised that they do - we know them for generations. We just wonder: afte the 9/11 and London (and other cities) bombs stories, what is it that you don't understand? Khatib may continue, and he and his leaders surely will, as long as people in the west will have this strange hunger for the half truths and complete lies.
Just let me remind you who was the world expert in this methods fo propaganda - his name was Gobles. Let me remind you who were Hitler's friends in the middle east back in WWII: Al Khuseini and others of his kind. And in case someone forgot their identity: they were Palestinians. Apparently, and really sadly, they learnt nothing and forgot nothing.
And so are many others.

David Brooks tells us in the NYTimes that Israel is in a psychological war with HAMAS:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/opinion/06brooks.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

And, a Norwegian physician treating Palestinian war victims in Gaza describes the use by the Israelis of new and illegal weapons:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11636

Max Blumenthal in the HUFFINGTON POST describes the claims of Zionist American pundits on how good are Israel's assaults on Gaza and how this is withering away US support for Israel:

http://www.alternet.org/audits/117568/

All in all, we are seeing a seismic shift in the moral standing of a nation that is really not a nation because it has no recognized borders, being in constant violent expansion and so refusing to define its limits. A noted Israeli political theorist once concluded that, as a result of no defined borders and consequent non-recognition of this expanding state by its neighbors, it cannot call itself a nation. So, a fetus of a nation on a very richly $$$ supplied American placenta, Israel has had the illusion that it is bound by no law either of physics or man. Even in response to American Jews that risk their own American standing in support of Israel, the Jerusalem Govt insisted since 2001 that these are foreigners and should mind their own business as Israel does whatever it wants. Yet, Israel is a helpless fetus on an American cash placenta supplying it billions of dollars a year.

And today, Israel is swinging between the Nazi Lebensraum thesis and the Holocaust victim due from the world reparations-- cash for moral hazard-- as it perpetrates war crimes for which, in the past, others have been hung.

The question is: does Israel do all this for "existential survival"?

The answer obviously is NO, particularly as TV news footage of the combat was interspersed with "shalom" appeals for tourism to Israel at this very time. Rather, numerous analysts in Israel and abroad define Israel's real existential problems as two:

1) Young Israelis, once educated, "sneak out" of Israel to take offers of jobs abroad that pay well in recognition of the high quality of Israeli education;

2) Diaspora Jews who have something to contribute to Israel refuse to move there. For example, Israel feels no compunction about advertising to American Jewish doctors-- DESPITE AMERICA'S DESPERATE SHORTAGE-- to "make the aliyah" to Israel, offering them all sorts of grants and fees at US taxpayers' expense (Ha'aretz). Yet, only older Diaspora Jews, in the main, retire to Israel; however, invariably, they leave in disgust as their pensions are exhausted on high taxes.

Today, "settlements" sneak out over Palestinian territories, engulfing them by force, if not by sheer madness. But the US DeptState tells us that 78% of these settlements are unpopulated because there are not enough settlers coming to live there. The Great Aliyah has dwindled to a trickle. And still, Israel expands, substituting "security" for lebensraum in its rhetoric as it disregards all efforts by its American benefactors to bring it into line with the moral and legal demands of the World Community.

"Security," let us recall, is how Hitler justified Germany's brutal expansion. The result was not security but destruction of all peoples subjugated vas well as the German "master race." In 2006, Israel was forced by GW Bush into an attack on Lebanon that was expected to expand to Syria and Iran. But Israel Army (IDF) incompetence and hubris cost a stalling of the attack resulting in a courageous withdrawal of forces by Israeli PM Olmert. For that, he was slandered in a neocon-Israeli conspiracy that depicted him as a petty thief of public funds. With an election before them, his Israeli successors in power-- Livni and Barak-- face severe biases that favor Netanyahu, the seeming Zionist hardliner of Likud: Livni is a woman and so was declared ineligible for the Premiership by the rabbis; and Barak is still despised for his bungling of the Clinton Peace Plan and is reputed to be a tricksters who invariably fails and tries to cover up with lies and erratic violence. This should be kept in mind when reading the following by Arnaud de Borchgrave, a rather radical pro-Zionist-Right publicist:

"The immediate objective in Gaza against Hamas is to restore Israel's image of military invincibility, badly damaged 2 1/2 years ago when a punitive raid into south Lebanon triggered a hail of Hezbollah rockets and missiles that forced the population of northern Israel into underground shelters. A botched Israeli military operation gave the Israel Defense Forces a black eye -- and invincible Israel, in the eyes of its enemies, became vincible."

Borchgrave provides us further analysis that, if correct, suggests that not only is the current "shooting fish [Palestinians] in a barbell [Gaza]"-- reminiscent of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews in the militarily surrounded and strangulated Warsaw Ghetto-- is a mere political gambit by the various electoral parties competing in the forthcoming election; but also, that the creeping "settlements" for non-existent "settlers" are really the main functions of an attempt to make sure that no Palestinian State ever comes into existence. This makes Israel's efforts even worse than those of the white racist Afrikaners in South Africa, trying to squeeze the blacks into Bantustans, and more like Milosevic’s attempt at "ethnic cleansing," because Israel is indeed trying to create an ever expanding purely JEWISH state by eliminating the Palestinians through displacement as refugees in the Arab world or through extermination by means of "made in the USA" firepower:

" For two of Israel's three principal contenders in the Feb. 10 elections, Defense Minister (and former Prime Minister) Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, hundreds of air strikes, a massive artillery barrage and a ground offensive against Hamas targets demonstrated they could be just as tough as the challenger, superhawk and former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. For those whose priority objective is the creation of a viable Palestinian state -- the United States, the European Union , 22 Arab countries -- it was yet another setback.

The geopolitical can named "Palestinian state" has been kicked down the road one more time. Slowly working its way back center stage was the 2002 Saudi plan that called for the recognition of Israel by all 22 Arab states in return for the territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War (with minor adjustments in Israel's favor to be negotiated). Originally put forward by Saudi King Abdullah seven years ago, and endorsed by the entire Arab world, moderate Arab leaders have been hinting President Obama would adopt it for his new Middle East roadmap.

Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008/09 have convinced an overwhelming majority of Israelis that a Palestinian state cannot coexist peacefully with the Jewish state. The 260,000 Jewish settlers in 140 settlements in the West Bank are not about to upstake to make room for a revanchist Palestinian state. The lessons of Hezbollah's missiles in 2006 and Hamas' in 2008 have convinced most Israelis a Palestinian nation in the West Bank, even if demilitarized under U.N. or even U.S. control, would not give up the dream of recovering the homes their fathers and grandfathers lost 62 years ago.

A month after Israel forced 8,500 Jewish settlers out of Gaza in December 2005, Hamas defeated the corrupt and ineffective Fattah movement in parliamentary elections. By 2007, a civil war drove Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his government out of Gaza to the West Bank, now under Israeli control.

Another showstopper for a Palestinian state is Jerusalem, specifically Arab East Jerusalem, where several thousand Israelis have moved in piecemeal over the past four decades. No Palestinian leader could accept anything less than a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, which no Israeli leader, expecting to stay alive politically, could endorse.

Meanwhile, Israel's rekindled status as invincible carried the day, aided and assisted in the midst of the Gaza offensive by the IDF's new YouTube channel, using the blogosphere as another war zone. Israeli politicians, drowned out by the voices of Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war, dominated news networks with footage from unmanned drones and fighter-bombers that showed Hamas loading rockets onto a pickup truck to be driven closer to the border -- but hit by an IAF air strike almost immediately."

Below is the URL for the entire de Borchgrave article: http://www.upi.com/Emerging_Threats/2009/01/05/Commentary_Israels_endgame/UPI-96761231165240/

Some American Zionist organizations are mercilessly punishing and trying to silence any questioners of critics of Israel's own version of the Warsaw Ghetto perpetrated on the inhabitants of Gaza. But hubris provokes reckless bragging by the Israelis and their friends over their ability to literally exterminate Palestinians. Thus, fear from defeat in Lebanon two years ago may have motivated the initial assault, but the hubris born of the massacre of a helpless people is producing rhetoric that has an eerie similarity to that emanating from Germany while it destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto.

One of the Founding Fathers of Zionism coined the term "Zionazis" to warn his people of the wrong path they were on, blinded by the ease with which they could murder, rape and pillage Palestinian villages. For those of us who consider the Jewish Community in the West a pillar of what is best in our moral culture, Israeli militarism and the blind support it extracts from much of the OFFICIAL Diaspora Jewish Community leaders, make us wonder if our enthusiastic support for Israel-- "my ally right no matter what"-- may not have been a disservice to it, fomenting the creation of a Frankenstein with our dollars and arms. Worst still, an America, broke and tethering on depression, cannot help but notice the monster it has nurtured through its immense foreign aid $$ placenta and fueled with its arms giveaway to Israel. Following Israel's tutoring of our troops post-9/11, we are more or less defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan. And just when we came to realize the devastating consequences of this "boom,boom,boom...kill, kill, kill" policy, we are asked to support what can only be classified as a "Zionazi" operation, using the term EXACTLY as devised by its Zionism Founding Father.

As Israeli casualties mount-- inevitable, given that the victims see no escape, just an opportunity to take some of the massacring IDF troops with them-- there is no doubt that the same political motives that moved Livni (noted in the Israeli press as an amoral opportunist) and Barak (also noted as a man driven mad by his own arrogance) into this war of annihilation, will drive them-- AS IN LEBANON-- into a meaningless cease-fire... meaningless in that though the fire ceases, the hate and thirst for revenge does not. Israel will then be surrounded by vengeful hate that turns into fearless military discipline. Such negative homogeneity it has not known for 50 years. Nothing, therefore, will have been accomplished to justify the current massacre from the air and from artillery, probably not even an end to the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. As the troops go in, IDF hubris born of bravado, will turn to an annoying whiney plea for $billions upon $billions more from the USA; these will be mixed with Israeli threats that if the American placenta is not engorged with dollars, the Israeli "Defense" Forces will be forced to attack anew, perhaps even Iran while US forces are helpless in next door Iraq.

Of course, coming from a self-depleting Israel, it will all be a bluff. Alas, HAMAS will have shown that, like Hezbollah, it can die in dignity and keep on firing those strategically meaningless rockets, nothing but symbols of defiance of a year long blockade and strangulation of Gaza interrupted by Israeli "targeted assassinations of HAMAS elected leaders.

Rabin, one courageous Israeli soldier said: "enough of the killing; let us make peace for our children." For his irresistible reasoning he got a bullet in the head when the rabbis issued a "fatwa" that any Jew willing to give an inch of "Jewish land" (sic) deserves to die. That was the end of the TWO states solution. The question Livni/Barak forced us to face is: FINE, IF YOU INSIST ON A *ONE* STATE SOLUTION, WHY DO WE HAVE TO EXSANGUINATE AMERICA SO THAT AN EXCLUSIVELY JEWISH STATE CAN KEEP THREATENING AND EXTERMINATING ITS OWN PALESTINIANS?

This invariably brings us back to the "one state" solution of two peoples in one nation that Arafat warned about. In such a state, where in loco Jews and Arabs have one-man-one-vote equality, soon the birth rate of Arabs will make Israel a predominantly Muslim state. The only option Zionists see for preventing that is to force Diaspora Jews to move "back home" (sic) to Israel. There exists no state today that distinguishes its Jewish from its other citizens. Therefore, there is no way that Israel can blackmail the West into expelling its Jews to Israel. Furthermore, it would be sheer folly to confuse the affection Jews have for Israel with duality of loyalty. Indeed, in the current crisis, few Israeli born "reverse aliyah" Americans returned to join the struggle. Instead-- like Rehm Emanuel, soon to be Obama's White House Chief-of-Staff-- they remained in their new homelands to loyally serve the interests of their adopted Diaspora homelands. The olims go West, not to Israel, in a reverse aliyah. The compelling reason has to do with something a hundred times as old as Zionism: Jewish culture and Jewish ethic, based on peace and building, not on war and destroying for lebensraum.

I can only hope that the American people, in their desperate search for a scapegoat for their economic catastrophe, do not look to their fellow American Jews. What the neocons will have to be in the docket of public opinion and history to account for in no way relates to American Jews, loyal "AMERICA FIRST" Americans-- mostly because they have recently suffered the opposite of what America stands for and thus have not not forgotten.

The totalitarian media in the West today, spewing propaganda on behalf of Israel, in no way suggests that "THE JEWS" are in control or in favor of what goes on in Gaza. The first neocon lie that they alone speak for American Jews and that Jews who oppose them are unbalanced "self-hating Jews" is a foolish gimmick that is the reason for current purging of the neocons from any position of influence. Obama won as much Jewish as black support, despite the malevolent "Big Lie" propaganda of the neocons that he is a Muslim and an anti-Semite. Indeed, as I can personally attest, the "anti-Semite" smear is an hysterical smokescreen put up by "professional" Jews-- reminiscent of "professional" anti-Communists-- whose goal is fear, hysteria and isolation so that OUR Jews live in panic and duly feed the coffers of these high-life frauds. Madoff's prototypes can be found as easily in the so-called "Holocaust Industry" as on Wall Street. It is up to us to make sure that our fellow Americans never lose sight Americanism of the mass majority of Jews who contributed so much to our society and so generously to our well being, forever distinguishing themselves from the small group of freaks, frauds and cheats who seek to acquire "mensch-hood" by stampeding us "goyim cattle" into what they want: they call it "World War IV."

Jews are as tortured by video from Gaza as any of us. Humanitarianism is as Jewish as is circumcision. And the bravura of old ex-Reds who seek to feel manly applauding the bloodshed is the abnormal in the Jewish Community, NOT the mass normal. We should all guard our Jewish neighbors' safety for, as ever in the short history of Zionism, the Zionists cared and care little for the Diaspora Jews that, in the words of PM Sharon, "will be damned, losing their Jewish soul" if they don't move to Israel with all their gelt by 2020. Throughout history Zionist cared little for those who remain diasporic, even through the Holocaust.

Israel is a wonderful nation that I always admired when I went there to learn about it and bathe in its achievements. But a mix of local motives and migrants from afar has driven it to grandomania madness. There is a most touching Israeli poem about an old man who spends his lonely grief-ridden days at the grave of his son, felled IDF soldier. The son cries out from the grave: do not cry for your loneliness, father, but for me who is under the dark, damp, cold ground because of your grandiose ideologies. I had so many dreams and could have done so much but you took it all from me, sending me to die for your ideologies. Israel's army is not professional, it is all reservists. Young Israelis, not knowing when they shave in the morning, whether they will put on a uniform to fight or a suit to build a career, have had enough and have been seeking refuge in the West. This bleeding of its youth is fatal to a nation and all the Arabs know it.

Now Iran stands to frighten Arabs with its future puny atomic bomb. This will draw them to seek protection under Israel's nuclear umbrella, the world's 4th largest, in exchange for which Israel can demand acceptance as an equal member of the region. Only Israel's high-tech ability can take the Arabs out of their one crop (oil) banana republic economies, making it indeed the "light onto the [Arab] nations" which the Founding Fathers of Zionism originally sought to become. But for now, we in the West must more vigilantly than ever protect our Jews; meanwhile, the Israelis must seek some sort of two nations, one economy relation with the Palestinians. HAMAS is nothing but the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Fundamentalist revolutionary organization which came into existence through the help of Ayatollah Khomeini of Shia Iran and Sharon of Israel, the latter hoping it would fragment Palestinian nationalism under Arafat. Like Hezbollah, it is a resistance religious group that seeks a return to religious compliance through combat. But most Palestinians are secular, distinguishing religion from politics. They voted for HAMAS (in an election forced on them by Bush) as a protest against corruption and incompetence in the Palestinian Authority. If instead of Zionazi punitive tactics for the way they voted (there is no need to mention GW Bush's criminal incompetence and irresponsible support for such "collective punishment" on all Gaza Palestinians), Israel had come to terms with HAMAS and had rewarded good management with economic cooperation, the present crisis, nor the rockets that fell on Israel, would have been the essence of the current scene. But Israel, as Borchgrave admits, is out to eliminate any Palestinian state. As he reports, that's why Israel feeds "facts on the ground" expansion of so-called settlements. A DETERMINED TRADE OF SETTLEMENTS BACK TO A 1967 BORDER IN EXCHANGE FOR A COMMON INTEGRATED ECONOMY WITH THE REGION WOULD MAKE ISRAEL THE LEADER RATHER THAN THE PARIAH OF THE MIDDLE EAST. Even now it is not too late. The weakness Israel has shown through its sedding of Gaza blood can more than be neutralized by an abandonment of its current Zionazi lebensraum policy, adopting in exchange, a total peace accord. Radical Islam is tired. Outrage may arouse it momentarily here and there, but nothing will make it slumber again like a real fair and mutually beneficial peace. This is the challenge for Obama and this is what Israel must courageously face.

The world's only religion born of forgiveness and kindness came from the same peoples who today manufacture hate towards each other. A civil ethic consistent with the roots of the region can convert the unforgiving desert in which these peoples live. If we stop buying their oil as if addicts ready to pay any price and allow the planet to reclaim the sand and the peoples therein, once we end our global warming pollution, the peoples of the Middle East will rediscover the old Jewish ethic of fairness from which both peoples provene.

Daniel E. Teodoru

Great article, though tragically Khatib ends his analysis pointing a finger of blame at the US and EU for ignoring the Israeli's "unfolding war crimes" without ever acknowledging the war crimes of Hamas deliberately instigating this "defensive incursion" by firing 6,000 rockets against civilian targets from behind human shields. The fact Khatib acknowledges without condemnation, that Hamas wants this war and accepts the price paid in innocent Palestinian lives is disappointing, but common among arab commentators.  You could argue complicity on the part of the US and EU, but direct responsibility lies solely at the feet of the combatants.