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FUTURE OF AL AQSA , AL QUDS AND FILISTEEN
#32
SIX DAYS THAT CHANGED THE MIDDLE EAST: 
THE ARAB-ISRAELI WAR



PALESTINE 1920:
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PALESTINIAN STORY



MAPS   VANISHING PALESTINE
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/palestineremix/maps_main.htm

Creating a Jewish state in Palestine was a deliberate, drawn-out and violent process. Palestinians were dispossessed of vast swathes of land. Over 80 percent of Palestinians in what became Israel in 1948 were made into refugees overnight. The process may have culminated in 1948, but it had begun in the early 20th century – and it still continues today.

To create the State of Israel, Zionist forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. Approximately 13,000 Palestinians were killed in 1948, with more than 750,000 expelled from their homes and becoming refugees – the climax of the Zionist movement’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today, the refugees and their descendants number more than seven million. Many still languish in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries, waiting to return to their homeland.

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ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE

To create the State of Israel, Zionist forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. Approximately 13,000 Palestinians were killed in 1948, with more than 750,000 expelled from their homes and becoming refugees – the climax of the Zionist movement’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today, the refugees and their descendants number more than seven million. Many still languish in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries, waiting to return to their homeland.

DRONE FOOTAGE


QISARYA

Palmach, a Zionist military unit whose commanders included Yitzhak Rabin, expelled the village’s Palestinian inhabitants in February 1948.
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JAFFA

After Haganah, the pre-state Zionist paramilitary organisation, expelled its inhabitants, less than 4,000 Palestinians remained. They are ghettoised in the Ajami district. Today, Israel includes Jaffa within Tel Aviv municipality.

ACRE
Israeli forces captured Acre in May 1948
There are still relics of fortifications, including a wall and a tower, from that period.
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JERUSALEM

The capital and the holiest city in historic Palestine. Over 80 percent of the city was captured by Zionists in 1948 and the remaining 20 percent, now known as East Jerusalem, was captured in 1967.RE VIDEO


THE SEPARATION WALL

A concrete and barbed wire wall built by Israel whose route lies predominantly inside the occupied West Bank. Construction began in 2002 and has resulted in the confiscation of Palestinian land by Israel and the ghettoisation of Palestinian communities.
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TEL AVIV

Founded in 1909 by the Zionist movement on the Mediterranean coast of historic Palestine, near Jaffa. It is the second most populous city in Israel, after Jerusalem. The Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area, which includes the Tel Aviv and Central Districts of Israel, contains 42 percent of Israel’s population.
 

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TEL AVIV

Today, Tel Aviv is an economic hub and serves as Israel’s financial capital. It is the fifth most visited city in the Middle East.
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HIGHWAY 6

Highway 6 runs from northern to southern Israel. One of Israel's largest infrastructure projects, it helps Israeli settlers commute between illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and Israel.
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JORDAN VALLEY

The lowest point on earth. It includes the Dead Sea, which is 790 metres below sea level. The Jordan Valley is the border region between historic Palestine and Jordan. Politically, as long as there is an Israeli army presence in the Jordan Valley, there is no possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank.
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SHUJAYEA

One of the largest neighbourhoods in Gaza City, with around 100,000 Palestinian residents. The area was frequently targeted by Israeli airstrikes in 2008-2009. During Israel's "Operation Protective Edge" in 2014, Israeli forces launched a massive military assault on the neighbourhood, killing at least 100 Palestinians and forcing residents to flee. “Shujayea” in Arabic means “courage”.
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AL SHATI REFUGEE CAMP
The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated places in the world. It is home to 1.8 million Palestinians, most of whom are the descendants of refugees expelled from other cities and villages in Palestine in 1948. One of the eight refugee camps in Gaza is Al-Shati Refugee Camp.
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GAZA PORT
The Gaza Strip’s small port is located near the Rimal district of Gaza City. It is the only port on the Mediterranean Sea where no ship from around the world is allowed to anchor, due to Israel’s occupation of the territory since 1967 and blockade.
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RIMAL
One of the most prosperous neighbourhoods in Gaza City, its main street connects the coastline with the old city.



PALESTINE IS NOT OCCUPIED, IT IS COLONISED  
Ramzy Baroud 


June 5 2018 marks the 51st anniversary of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. But, unlike the massive popular mobilisation that preceded the anniversary of the Nakba – the catastrophic destruction of Palestine in 1948 – on 15 May the anniversary of the occupation is hardly generating equal mobilisation. 

The unsurprising death of the ‘peace process’ and the inevitable demise of the ‘two-state solution’ has shifted the focus from ending the occupation per se to the larger, and more encompassing, problem of Israel’s colonialism throughout Palestine. Grassroots mobilisation in Gaza and the West Bank, and among Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Naqab Desert, are, once more, widening the Palestinian people’s sense of national aspirations. Thanks to the limited vision of the Palestinian leadership those aspirations have, for decades, been confined to Gaza and the West Bank. 

In some sense the ‘Israeli occupation’ is no longer an occupation as per international standards and definitions. It is merely a phase of the Zionist colonisation of historic Palestine, a process that began over a 100 years ago, and carries on to this day.  “The law of occupation is primarily motivated by humanitarian consideration; it is solely the facts on the ground that determine its application”, states the International Committee of the Red Cross website

It is for practical purposes that we often utilise the term ‘occupation’ with reference to Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land, occupied after 5 June 1967. The term allows for the constant emphasis on humanitarian rules that are meant to govern Israel’s behavior as the occupying power.

However, Israel has already, and repeatedly, violated most conditions of what constitute an ‘occupation’ from an international law perspective, as articulated in the 1907 Hague Regulations (articles 42-56) and the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention. According to these definitions, an ‘occupation’ is a provisional phase, a temporary situation that is meant to end with the implementation of international law regarding that particular situation. 

Military occupation’ is not the sovereignty of the occupier over the occupied; it cannot include the transfer of citizens from the territories of the occupying power to occupied land; it cannot include ethnic cleansing; destruction of properties; collective punishment and annexation. It is often argued that Israel is an occupier that has violated the rules of occupation as stated in international law. This would have been the case a year, two or five years after the original occupation had taken place, but not 51 years later. Since then, the occupation has turned into long-term colonisation. 

An obvious proof is Israel’s annexation of occupied land, including the Syrian Golan Heights and Palestinian East Jerusalem in 1981. That decision had no regard for international law, humanitarian law or any other law. Israeli politicians have, for years, openly debated the annexation of the West Bank, especially areas that are populated with illegal Jewish settlements, which are built contrary to international law.

Those hundreds of settlements that Israel has been building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not meant as temporary structures. Dividing the West Bank into three zones, areas A, B and C, each governed according to different political diktats and military roles, has little precedent in international law. Israel argues that, contrary to international law, it is no longer an occupying power in Gaza; however, an Israel land, maritime and aerial siege has been imposed on the Strip for over 11 years. From successive Israeli wars that have killed thousands, to a hermetic blockade that has pushed the Palestinian population to the brink of starvation, Gaza subsists in isolation. 

Gaza is an ‘occupied territory’ by name only, without any of the humanitarian rules applied. In the last 10 weeks alone, over 120 unarmed protesters, journalists and medics were killed and 13,000 wounded, yet the international community and law remain inept, unable to face or challenge Israeli leaders or to overpower equally cold-hearted American vetoes.

The Palestinian Occupied Territories have, long ago, crossed the line from being occupied to being colonised. But there are reasons that we are trapped in old definitions, leading amongst them is American political hegemony over the legal and political discourses pertaining to Palestine. One of the main political and legal achievements of the Israeli war – which was carried out with full US support – on several Arab countries in June 1967 is the redefining of the legal and political language on Palestine. Prior to that war, the discussion was mostly dominated by such urgent issues as the ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinian refugees to go back to their homes and properties in historic Palestine. 

The June war shifted the balance of power completely, and cemented America’s role as Israel’s main backer on the international stage. Several UN Security Council resolutions were passed to delegitimise the Israeli occupation: UNSCR 242, UNSCR 338, and the less talked about but equally significant UNSCR 497. 

Resolution 242 of 1967 demanded “withdrawal of Israel armed forces” from the territories it occupied in the June war. Resolution 338, which followed the war of 1973, accentuated and clarified that demand. Resolution 497 of 1981 was a response to Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. It rendered such a move “null and void and without international and legal affect”. The same applied to the annexation of Jerusalem as to any colonial constructions or any Israeli attempts aimed at changing the legal status of the West Bank. 

But Israel is operating with an entirely different mindset. Considering that anywhere between 600,000 to 750,000 Israeli Jews now live in the ‘Occupied Territories’, and that the largest settlement of Modi’in Illit houses more than 64,000 Israeli Jews, one has to wonder what form of military occupation blue-print Israel is implementing, anyway? Israel is a settler colonial project, which began when the Zionist movement aspired to build an exclusive homeland for Jews in Palestine, at the expense of the native inhabitants of that land in the late 19th century. Nothing has changed since. Only facades, legal definitions and political discourse. The truth is that Palestinians continue to suffer the consequences of Zionist colonialism and they will continue to carry that burden until that original sin is boldly confronted and justly remedied. 

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HOW ISRAEL's VIOLENT BIRTH DESTROYED PALESTINE
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/04/israel-violent-birth-destroyed-palestine-
170424114255909.html

Dr Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for more than 20 years. He is an internationally syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include Searching Jenin, The Second Palestinian Intifada, and his latest, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story. 
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RE: FUTURE OF AL AQSA and AL QUDS - by globalvision2000administrator - 06-16-2021, 04:56 PM

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