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(Haaretz) May 12, 2010 – “We will never divide Jerusalem,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his speech commemorating Jerusalem Day on Ammunition Hill.
“Jerusalem Day marks the day the city began positively developing for all its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike. We will never again make Jerusalem a divided, disunited, and isolated city.”
Jerusalem Day marks 43 years since the establishment of Israeli control over East Jerusalem in 1967.
“We will continue to build and be built in Jerusalem. We will continue to develop, plan, and create in Jerusalem,” said Netanyahu in his speech. “We cannot develop in a divided city.”
“We are the generation that had the privilege of seeing Jerusalem united, and we need to impart this privilege onto our children and grandchildren,” said the prime minister.
“The connection Israel has to Jerusalem is extremely deep and it surpasses any connection any other country has to a city. The connection stayed strong for thousands of years and now it’s stronger than ever.”
(FMEP) – Oops … that was the news headline during the reign of Netanyahu I in 1996.
When assessing the colonization policies of Israel’s two main parties–Labor and Likud–it is instructive to recall a bit of Israeli folk wisdom. “A Likud government,” the saying goes, “announces ten settlements but builds only one, while a Labor government announces one but builds ten.”
The governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres operated in just such a spirit during the last four years, when the Israeli settler population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip grew by 49 percent–to 150,500–and the population in annexed East Jerusalem grew by 33 percent–to almost 200,000. More than 100 settlements increased their populations during Labor’s rule.
“Iranian people are the flagbearer of everything good in the world: justice, pureness, peace and friendship. Resistance towards this [Israeli] regime is a national and global duty. The people of Iran will never put this flag down. The only route for salvation is resisting the corrupt Zionist channel in the world. You should know that, due to God’s will, the final victory of the revolutionary people of the world front against Zionism is in our hands.”
[I don’t think the raving of a tyrant will help the poor people of Iran in the long run – Oui]
“We are the generation that had the privilege of seeing Jerusalem united” ???
Too bad Netanyahu didn’t get a chance to see Jerusalem over the 2000 years when it was undivided, that is, before the 1948 war that led to its division. And before the 1948 war, it was mostly or exclusively an Arab-Palestinian city, even though the Jewish population rose with the coming of the Zionists.
History is elusive to him I gather.
And those claims of land, including the Jordanian border beyond the Jordan Valley pretty much adds up to Apartheid. Do these right wing nuts know what they are doing?
Everyone better realize they know what they’re doing because they’re doing it and they’re doing it successfully. ‘Apartheid’ is just a word.
‘Palestine’ = Greater Israel = land, real estate, wealth, power. All this under the guise of negotiating and with US connivance (governmental and private). And no one anywhere is really opposing the Israeli expansion into other peoples houses, onto their land, the daily destruction of Palestinian lives and families.
Sadly, you’re correct. The fourth estate, the press, has been taken care of by the proIsrael propagandists, and no one is hearing about those daily human rights abuses. The censorship and Israel bias of the American press has never been more evident than today.
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(The Forward) May 14, 2010 – While Goldstone, as reported by Yediot, adhered to apartheid laws, he is also credited with having used his judicial power to under-mine some racial restrictions. In 1986 he handed down a decision limiting the government’s ability to evict black people living in neighborhoods designated for whites. This decision paved the way for abolishing racially based residency restrictions.
Goldstone is also credited with having helped bring down the curtain on apartheid through a government-commissioned investigation he led that exposed the existence of covert state-sponsored terror units deployed by South Africa against its own black citizenry.
“He was brave. He could’ve been killed,” Benjamin Pogrund, a former South African journalist and founder of the Yakar Center for Social Concern in Jerusalem, told the Forward in September 2009, shortly after Goldstone’s commission released its report.
Still, for many Israelis and pro-Israel activists, the apartheid-era decisions handed down by Goldstone and detailed in Yediot were viewed as a blow to Goldstone’s credibility.
Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a South African Jew and fellow at the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, urged Israel not to continue down the path forged by Yediot. Polakow-Suransky, who recently published a book on Israeli-South African relations during apartheid, noted that Israel had served as Pretoria’s primary arms supplier during that period. Writing on Foreign Policy’s website, Polakow-Suransky called on Israel to examine its own “shameful history” before criticizing Goldstone.
In his e-mail to the Forward, Goldstone wrote: “I have been judged by my fellow South Africans and by President Mandela for my role both during and after apartheid, and I find it curious that no one in Israel ever raised the issue except to laud me, prior to my Gaza report.”
Goldstone pointed to the fact that Mandela appointed him to serve on South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitutional Court as evidence that his rulings under apartheid were not out of line. “South Africans, who are of course familiar with my record and with apartheid, have not made the sort of allegations that certain members of the Israeli press and government are currently making.”
See my comments on Israel and Apartheid’s WMD development
“That is why the United States is fighting against anti-Semitism in international institutions – our special envoy for anti-Semitism is traveling the world as we speak, raising the issue at the highest levels of countries from one end of the world to the next. It is why we led the boycott of the Durban II Conference. (Applause.) It is why we repeatedly and vigorously voted against and spoke out against the Goldstone Report. (Applause.)”
≈ Cross-posted from shergald’s diary — Hypocrisy Now!: The Hanging of Judge Richard Goldstone ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."