the settlers are there on illegal settlement , they know that and they are taking the risks . all of them are not only protected by armed as well and many times they attacked children on their way to school and shot at donkeys and mules going to market . they have thrashed the palestians areas on a daily basis and destroyed most their trees and helped themselves to their produced (blessed by a rabbi whose name i forgot )

The Israeli settlers also attacked the Palestinians in Hebron and this resulted in wounding one Palestinian child and the burning of several Palestinian properties in the city which witnesses violent confrontations with the Israeli soldiers.

http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/010427/2001042709.html

Israeli civilians, especially settlers, harassed, attacked, and occasionally killed Palestinians in the occupied territories. There were credible reports that settlers killed at least 14 Palestinians during the year. In one case, an Israeli civilian killed a Palestinian who previously had attacked a settlement and killed an IDF soldier. Settlers also caused economic damage to Palestinians by attacking and damaging greenhouses and agricultural equipment, uprooting olive trees, and damaging other valuable crops. The settlers did not act under government orders in the attacks; however, the Israeli Government did not prosecute the settlers for their acts of violence. In general settlers rarely serve prison sentences if convicted of a crime against Palestinians.

http://www.humanrights-usa.net/reports/occupiedterritories.html
Settlers have shot and killed several Palestinians in the past decade, with the perpetrators sometimes receiving little or no punishment.
To protect the settlers and their roads, Israel has sliced the West Bank and Gaza into a patchwork of smaller units that can be sealed at will. This situation, Palestinians say, denies them the territorial contiguity and freedom of movement they need for a viable state. They believe the problem has not been adequately addressed by any of the proposals floated by Israeli negotiators.
The Oslo agreement, signed seven years ago by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, was to have frozen the expansion of these settlements, leaving their future to later negotiations. Since then, however, Israel has accelerated settlement construction dramatically, bringing an additional 50,000 Jews to the West Bank and Gaza. To Palestinians, now accused of rejecting Oslo by turning to violence, Israel violated its Oslo commitments long ago by unilaterally and significantly altering these facts on the ground.

All settlements are illegal under international law.
The Fourth Geneva Convention expressly prohibits an Occupying Power from deporting or transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. [8] According to the Commentary of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the prohibition on the establishment of settlements is “intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories. Such transfer
worsened the economic situation of the native population and endangered their separate existence as a race.”
In addition, Israeli settlements violate United Nations Security Council Resolutions, including UNSCR 452 (1979) calling upon “the Government and people of Israel to cease, on an urgent basis, the establishment, construction and planning of settlements in the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem.” This resolution has never been enforced.

http://www.jmcc.org/news&media/editorial2.htm

Dear Elkajim,

Please quote some references we can believe!

James

First the only settlers are the Arabs who have moved into that region, for the West Bank is historic Israel. It is only generosity of Israel that it has considered giving up her historic rights to achieve peace with her neighbours. No nation in the world has given up territory won in a war, particulary when it has been attacked.

Though I agree that the Two Nations living side by side in peace, is dead in the water. The only realistic option is that Arabs in the West bank are absorbed in the Palestinian state of Jordan and the former Egyptian Arabs of Gaza, revert to their original status. I cannot see why a viable and the only functional democracy in the region, Israel, should be dismantled to create yet another Islamic state, with all that bodes for Jews and Christians alike. Moreover such an option would defeat the whole purpose of the War on Terror ie to create more free democracies in that region.

They don't get it, do they; every Israeli is a settler, from the aliyah of the 1880s, to today.
The reaction of the Arabs, is remarkably similar
from the 1920 uprising, and the '29 Hebron massacre, through to the 1st intifadah, back in
1936-39; to the establishment of the state of
Isrel, and beyond. This pattern holds from Ibn
Saud's neutrality toward the Reich, to the Rashid
Ali farhoud of '41, to the Syrian defense minister; who majored in the blood libel that provoked the Damascus blood libel; and his
comrade Abu Mazen, colleague of the Black September assasin Ali Salameh

Well, Tilley's article is exactly how you characterize it, but it may be a mistake to take her too seriously. She's an academic (out of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown U., naturally) which means that her views resonate only in the echo chamber of Middle Eastern studies and Counterpunch.org. No one is going to pay her much mind outside rareified left-wing and anti-Israel circles.

Is it any accident that she leads her piece with an Edward Said quote? An oddly opaque and dispirited one, to be sure, but if nothing else the equivalent of a consumer's warning, Do not read without vomit bag. She's preaching to the choir. But in the real world, where Said groupies are reviled, nothing will come of it.

Couple of points. One: she has no program other than a pointless appeal to the international community to abolish Israel. Feckless, but fitting. Two: what she's advocating is the ultimate regression; the Palestinians have sought to abolish Israel since its founding under the guise of a "democractic, secular" one-state solution. Hasn't quite worked for them so far, has it? But the one thing missing from Tilley's little exercise is any inclination to hold the Palestinians accountable. Arafat is incorrigible? Well, it's Israel's fault, she intimates, because Sharon isn't interested in removing him. How about this: why not require that the Palestinians demonstrate some capacity for democractic self-governance before we start dismantling a state that actually functions as a democracy.

Dear James,

"Please quote some references we can believe!"

"Ariel Sharon responds to the suicide bombers by using the full force of the Israeli army. He is having absolutely no effect in ending the terrorist acts. The suicide bombings and the slaughter of Jewish innocents continue and, as Colin Powell said while in Israel, will go on--not only regardless of what Ariel Sharon's army does, but impelled by what it does." - Gerald Kaufman MP at: http://www.deiryassin.org/gkaufman.html

"In 1948, the Palestinians denounced what they described as a massacre in the village of Deir Yassin. It was denied that there was such a massacre, but it was later officially established by the incoming Israeli Government that 254 Palestinians had been murdered wantonly by Begin's Irgun and the Stern gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir--later, like Begin and Sharon, a Likud Prime Minister." - Gerald Kaufman MP at: http://www.deiryassin.org/gkaufman.html

"Britain's chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, today delivers an unprecedentedly strong warning to Israel, arguing that the country is adopting a stance "incompatible" with the deepest ideals of Judaism, and that the current conflict with the Palestinians is "corrupting" Israeli culture. In a move that will send shockwaves through Israel and the world Jewish community, Professor Sacks departs from his usual policy of offering only public endorsement of Israel, and broad support for moves toward peace, by giving an explicit verdict on the effect that 35 years of military occupation and decades of conflict are having on Israel and the Jewish people.

"'I regard the current situation as nothing less than tragic,' he tells the Guardian in an exclusive interview. 'It is forcing Israel into postures that are incompatible in the long run with our deepest ideals.'

"He goes on to speak of being 'profoundly shocked' at the recent reports of smiling Israeli servicemen posing for a photograph with the corpse of a slain Palestinian. 'There is no question that this kind of prolonged conflict, together with the absence of hope, generates hatreds and insensitivities that in the long run are corrupting to a culture.'" - from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,781113,00.html

"Israel has turned into a 'pariah state' under prime minister Ariel Sharon and his ways of dealing with terrorism are 'unacceptable', Jewish senior Labour MP Gerald Kaufman has claimed." - from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1874459.stm

"Israeli leader Ariel Sharon has been branded a 'war criminal' and a 'fool' by former Labour minister Gerald Kaufman. In a blistering attack, the veteran MP, who is Jewish, said Mr Sharon had reduced his country to an 'international pariah' whose actions were staining the Star of David with blood." - from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1933309.stm

"Yesterday's edition of The Daily Telegraph described how Israeli soldiers beat Muntaha Seraya with their fists and guns after bursting into her home. Four months pregnant, she suffered a miscarriage half an hour after the soldiers left. Today's Daily Telegraph accepts the Palestinian estimate of hundreds killed. The Times today describes the 'stench of death' in Jenin, and The Independent calls what happened there a 'war crime'." - from: http://globalist.org/world_regions/asia/palestine-israel/020418_kaufman_speech.html

"In September 1982, the Israeli cabinet resolved to establish a commission led by then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Yitzhak Kahan to examine the facts of the massacre committed by the Lebanese Forces in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, areas in Beirut then under the control of Israeli authorities. As many as 2,000 Palestinian civilians were killed in the camps. This year, one of the individuals judged complicit by the Kahan Commission, then-Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon, was elected to the highest political post in Israel after having provoked a violent confrontation by his visit to the Haram al-Sharif. In 1982, he was found to have created the situation which he knew, or should have known, made the massacres a probability. The need has now arisen to bring serious attention to the moral and legal responsibility of Sharon for gross human rights violations and the impunity, and even worse the power, which he has received." - from: http://www.mediamonitors.net/lindamalone1.html

"Physicians for Human Rights USA (PHR) finds [November 2000] that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has used live ammunition and rubber bullets excessively and inappropriately to control demonstrators, and that based on the high number of documented injuries to the head and thighs, Israeli soldiers appear to be shooting to inflict harm, rather than solely in self-defense. . ." - from: http://www.phrusa.org/research/forensics/israel/Israel_force.html

Any readers here interested in knowing of a widely acclaimed book, which for me shed altogether new light on the tragic history of the conflict in Palestine, may like to know of: Avi Shlaim: The Iron Wall; Penguin Books (2001). The author, an Israeli, is professor of international relations at Oxford University.

Of course, some regard any evidence as irrelevant or incredible when it does not accord with their prior beliefs.

Yes, I have often thought things would be so much better on the Indian Subcontinent if Pakistan had not been created, and the exclusively ethnic Muslim state of Pakistan merged into the secular state of India, as it was under The Raj.

Ever since Jinnah created this tribal state it has been poor, riven with strife and military dictatorship......it makes one laugh to imagine call-centres being taken to Pakistan. It has been a failure, neither democracy, nor prosperous, nor safe, nor stable.

Given the Nazis could not have murdered most of Europe's Jews without the almost complete co-operation of most of Europe, the question should be whether Europe has any moral right to exist.

One could argue with equivalent moral justification that west Europeans were at least passive accomplices in the estimated deaths of some 62 million civilians attributable to governments in the Soviet Union from 1917 through 1991, excluding war dead, about three times the total attributable to the Third Reich 1933-45 - figures from: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

Curiously, little is made nowadays of the number of Soviet victims, as though they were, somehow, lesser humans. Asked for comment on the crumbling Soviet empire, the late Georges Marchais, secretary general of the French Communist Party, replied: "I tell you, they didn't arrest enough. They didn't imprison enough. If they had been tougher and more vigilant, they wouldn't have got into the situation they are in now." [Jonathan Fenby: France on the Brink (1999)] But then "how many people were in the West, including such visitors to the USSR as the Webbs, Bernard Shaw and HG Wells, were impressed by the achievements which Stalin claimed for Soviet planning, and dismissed as anti-Soviet propagnda the reports of famine in the Ukraine or of mass deportations to the camps." [Alan Bullock: Hitler and Stalin - Parallel Lives (1993)]

Curious too, that so little mention is made of the terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946. That cost 91 lives, mostly British civil servants working there as administrators in the Palestine mandate. The person widely credited with organising that atrocity went on to become the Likud prime minister of Israel 1977-83.

bob: Just to take one of your points that caught my eye: "Today's Daily Telegraph accepts the Palestinian estimate of hundreds killed." With reference to Jenin, that is certainly no longer true.
But the real point is why do you spend so much time looking for things to discredit Israel? It is easy to find plenty of Jews (in Israel and outside) being critical of Israel, in various degrees of intensity, and there is plenty to criticize, and plenty of Israelis accept criticism of their government's policies - and agree with the critics. That is no surprise.
But it's the one sided nature of attacks such as yours that are unacceptable - refusing to recognize the basic fact that whatever Israel has done and does is in response to Arab refusal to accept the Jewish presence in that part of the world. Whether or not you accept that Jewish presence is a different subject, which has nothing to do with Israel's real or imagined or exaggerated misdeeds.

A Palestinian state of any sort would be the greatest disaster for that region. And this would be particularly dangerous for Jordan. The last time Palestinians had any power in Jordan, they almost destabilised King Hussein, until he took drastic action. The action was so drastic that Palestinian fedayeen even fled to Israel for protection. But no one hears about this, as the it was just Arabs against Arabs. And it is curious and almost magical how these same Arabs become Palestinians, the moment Israel is mentioned. But no matter.

The next step in Arafat's nobel prize winning career, was to destabilise the delicate balance between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, the only functional democratic state in the Arab world. The result, a decade long civil war, the massacre of Christians in Damour and elsewhere in Lebanon. As a consequence, when Christian Arabs got the chance they took revenge. And guess who got the blame. The Jews.

But I agree with the author, that there is no room, physical or political for yet another Islamic state. Such a state under Arafat would be a threat to Jordan and it is likely that Jordan would dismantle it at the earliest convenient time.

I'm afraid that the sell by date for 'Two states' has lapsed and it is the Arab/Palestinians who will are the losers.

Why are the chattering classes obsessed with Israel?
I couldn't care less about the country myself. Perhaps if we ignore it the problem will go away.

At last! A new idea. Ignore the problem. It's so simple; so direct. Why did no one think of it before now?

well this article has helped me come to an epipheny, a conclusion that will bring world peice.

as per this model,

the southwest states of america, ie arizona, new mexico, texas, were formerly part of mexico so to be fair since so many mexicans are coming back to thier homeland it should be takin back from america in the name of piece and givin to mexico. then all anglo's well have to be cleansed because none can live in or own land in historically hispanic lands.

mexico, which has taken lands historically native indian i.e. (aztec)should give its land back to native indians. all ethnically spanish peoples will need to go back to spain.

spain will need to cede all lands basque to the basques and all not ethnically basque will need to be cleansed from the land back to spain proper.

the british isles needs to be broken up, wales for the welsh! and anyone with even a nominally french sounding name or an anglacized norman name should be stripped from the land and sent back to normandy.

(caveat, all muslims in britian get to stay because they are a special class that cannot be critiqued.)

france will need to be for the french, (jews can never really be french and cause to many problems, what with them inciting people to murder them and all. so they need to be put in a boat and set adrift since they sprang out of no where and really never had a historical homeland. (thats all a fable) but again all the muslims are special and can not be the subject of discusion, so they stay.

this model is based on the former yugoslavian model because it has done so well in the balkans, it should be exported around the world to ensure world piece.

Theodopoulos: the point is not to ignore the problem but to try and be constructive in finding a solution. The endless raking over of past sins, whether real or imagined, does absolutely nothing to solve anything but simply exacerbates bad feelings on both sides. I simply question the motives of people who spend hours searching the internet for negative remarks about Israel, as if that proves anything.

Ilana,

"But the real point is why do you spend so much time looking for things to discredit Israel?"

The truth is that I don't. It just happens that I have a good memory and a way with web search engines and history sources, which I apply in many direction - I've current posts up elsewhere on the refusal of the European Court of Auditors to endorse EU accounts for the ninth year in succession and on football violence. More importantly, I share the moral outrage of those who believe the Likudists in Israel, especially Sharon, have behaved badly.

From experience, there are some powerful online lobbies, of which the pro-Israel lobby is one and it works hard to suppress any criticism of the Israeli state. Westerners who post criticism are apt to get painted at least as anti-semites, if not Nazis - and I write with experience. There is a Palestinian side to the story and that, in all justice, deserves to be told as well. It also important to resist the degeneration of the international debate into primitive tribalism by showing that not all jews endorse every action of the Israeli state regardless. For a more even-handed account of history of the conflict for Palestine, I commend as others have done: Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall (2001).

From the Financial Times of 14 November:

"Israel is heading for a 'catastrophe' unless government policy switches course to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians, four former heads of the Shin Bet security service said on Friday.

"The unprecedented attack, in the Yedioth Ahronoth daily newspaper, follows recent criticism by Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli army chief, who said the crackdown in the occupied territories was against Israel's 'strategic interest' in fostering militancy. However, the current Shin Bet leadership favours maintaining tough restrictions to prevent attacks. . ."

Gee, Bob, where would all those voiceless Palestinians be without brave souls like you doing battle against the all-powerful Jewish lobby? Who knows, without useful idiot Western supporters cheering them on from the sidelines the Palestinians might even shed some of their more absolutist delusions.

zionists have a look at this link .

http://www.rense.com/general44/olive.htm

shows you the great lengths the settlers go to to destroy the livelyhood of the palestinians (just in case you dont know the tree are their only means of putting bread on the table ) it is not just trees in the wildness being chopped. the palestinians have zero economy , all their shops , factories , buildings have been destroyed , so they rely on the olives and oranges to make a meagre living . even that has been taken away from you .
but that does not bother you, as long as lives of israelis are not in jeopardy . that is racism (even anti semitism as well, remember arab are a semitic race

bob: The assertion that Israel's defenders label all its critics as anti-semites is one of those statements that is cannot be proven, but I find the implication that Israel's supporters try to "suppress" criticism faintly anti-semitic in itself, not to say ludicrous. The sheer volume of anti Israel stuff on the web gives the lie to that. Try putting "Israel is the source of all evil" into your search engine, you'll probably get millions of hits. Try it replacing "Israel" with "Jew" - same thing.
You appear to be saying that the Palestinian side never gets told; you must be inhabiting an alternative universe to the one where I live where we hear very little BUT the Palestinian side. Where is your criticism of Palestinian actions - or is your "moral outrage" reserved only for Israel? And where is your understanding of the intolerable pressures that have driven Israelis to respond as they do - maybe you think their actions are misguided, could you honestly say you would react differently if you were in their shoes?

According to you, to avoid a "descent into tribalism" there must be Jews who oppose Sharon. But as you yourself have shown, hundreds of thousands of Jews do not support Sharon. Can you say the same about Palestinian support for Arafat, or is Palestinian monolithic opposition to Israel somehow not a descent into tribalism?
Again, I say where is the constructive side in all this - we can all find things to criticise.

Ilana,

"The assertion that Israel's defenders label all its critics as anti-semites is one of those statements that is cannot be proven, but I find the implication that Israel's supporters try to 'suppress' criticism faintly anti-semitic in itself, not to say ludicrous."

Try this reporting Sharon's claim that his critics are anti-semites: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-893591,00.html and this from Larry Summers, President of Harvard and previously Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration:

". . where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent." - from: http://www.israelaustin.com/israelnow/news/26sep2002d.asp

"You appear to be saying that the Palestinian side never gets told; you must be inhabiting an alternative universe to the one where I live where we hear very little BUT the Palestinian side. Where is your criticism of Palestinian actions - or is your 'moral outrage' reserved only for Israel?"

Like you, I am probably responding to the blogs I frequent and the media I read where accounts of the Palestinian side are sparse and those that there - as occasionally on the BBC or in The Guardian - are apt get instantly denounced, if not dubbed anti-semitic.

"could you honestly say you would react differently if you were in their shoes?"

From this, it seems that a growing number of the members of the Israeli armed forces are presently disassociating themselves from the actions and policies of Sharon's government:

"With the Israel Defense Forces in the fourth year of battle with the Palestinians, the most dominant institution in Israeli society is also embroiled in a struggle over its own character, according to dozens of interviews with soldiers, officers, reservists and some of the nation's preeminent military analysts. . . Nearly 600 members of the armed forces have signed statements refusing to serve in the Palestinian territories. Active-duty and reserve personnel are criticizing the military in public. Parents of soldiers are speaking out as well, complaining that the protection of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is not worth the loss of their sons and daughters."
- from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54448-2003Nov17?language=printer

On Larry Summers' interpretation they "are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent," which is patently absurd.

It is always amusing to see the end results of the syphilitic minds of the anti Semites of the British cahttering classes. Other colonial wars that the UK fought in: Ireland, Kenya, India (1857-58), Afghanistan, South Africa, the Sudan, Cyprus, Malaysia, were far more brutal then the fight with an emerging Israel, yet the Brits cannot seem to forgive those damned Jews for tossing them out of Palestine. As for the Pali economy going down the toilet, well they brought this war upon thmeselves, and enabled the kleptocracy which is Arafatistan so they can cry me a river.

BTW the King David Hotel, the arrogant British commander was warned via telephone to evacuate and his reply was "we don't take orders from Jews, we give them."

There was just a news item about a Palestinian mother who murdered her own daughter, to protect the family "honor." There is evidently widespread approval of such killings.

In a "bi-national" state, of course, such things would be commonplace. Israeli Palestinians who might prefer a different lifestyle would be given no alternatives; neither would Jews (assuming any were allowed to survive at all).

Wasn't it the French ambassador who referred to Israel as 'that shitty little country' ? How true!

Travis,

"Other colonial wars that the UK fought in: Ireland, Kenya, India (1857-58), Afghanistan, South Africa, the Sudan, Cyprus, Malaysia, were far more brutal then the fight with an emerging Israel, yet the Brits cannot seem to forgive those damned Jews for tossing them out of Palestine."

You have oddly omitted what I personally regard as the most infamous of Britain's historic colonial wars: the Opium Wars with China over the right to sell opium to the Chinese, as the result of which Britain acquired Hong Kong. Nor have you mentioned the barbaric slave trade in the 18th century, the horrors of which arguably surpass anything else in the box file for atrocities perpetrated in Britain's imperial past.

As it happens, "the state of emergency" in Malaya 1948-60 is an exceptionally poor example to invoke in support of your cause because: (1) it is the exceptional example since WW2 of a successful campaign against insurgency - as compared with French Indo-China, Algeria etc; and (b) the outcome of the independent, sovereign state of Malaysia in 1963 was benign and certainly not what was intended by the Communist insurgents.

The appropriate conclusion is that you are perhaps dabbling in areas of which you appear to know little and the really sad thing is that you miss the point. We don't have a national, monolithic view on Britain's colonial wars. I certainly have no vested interest in defending the moral reputation of British imperialism, especially as almost all of it happened centuries before I was born - it would make as much sense to rail against the undoubted savagery of the Mongol invasions of the 13th century or what happened to Native Americans. The instructive, prescient insight is that of Disraeli - the grandson of immigrants to Britain and prime minister in 1868 and 1874-80 - who wrote in a letter in 1852: "These wretched colonies will all be independent, too, in a few years, and are a millstone round our necks."

The Palestine mandate, inherited from the League of Nations, was nothing more than a liability with British forces attempting to maintain some sort of balance amid the growing tensions between the settled Palestinians and incoming migrants. At the same time after WW2, Britain had far better reason to hold on to India or Burma but readily ceded independence to both.

But I digress:

"BTW the King David Hotel, the arrogant British commander was warned via telephone to evacuate and his reply was 'we don't take orders from Jews, we give them.'

So you say and it's a convenient storyline. The bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946 at the cost of 91 lives was nevertheless a terrorist atrocity perpetrated by a man who went on to become the elected prime minister of Israel. What sort of message do you suppose that sends out to the Palestinians?

> "BTW the King David Hotel, the arrogant British
> commander was warned via telephone to evacuate and
> his reply was 'we don't take orders from Jews, we give
> them.'
>
> So you say and it's a convenient storyline.

And a true one.

> The bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946 at the
> cost of 91 lives was nevertheless a terrorist atrocity
> perpetrated by a man who went on to become the elected
> prime minister of Israel.

The King David Hotel was being used as a military base. Thus it was not a civilian target, except that the British had chosen to place their military base in the midst of civilians, which is generally forbidden by the 4th Geneva Convention. Technically, then, its bombing was not terrorism - and the civilian lives would not have been lost if the commander had heeded the warning and evacuated.

> What sort of message do you
> suppose that sends out to the Palestinians?

One that they have never heeded. If the Palestinians took it as a model for appropriate behavior, restricted themselves to bombing only Israeli military installations and sent warnings of bombs to protect civilian lives who might be affected in such cases, that would be a perfectly splendid message for them to take from it.

When Stalin invaded Poland on September 17, 1939 his NKVD transported 1.5-2 million Polish citizens in cattle-trucks to Siberia and left them to die. He did of course arrange for 15.000+ to be murdered at Katyn and others to be used as slave labour.

When Hitler finally got tired of his ally, the USSR and attacked, Stalin was reluctantly persuaded to disgorge some of the poor specimens of humanity to fight with the British as the Carpathian Regiment.....they were brought out to Iran and fought in North Africa and at Monte Cassino.

However about 3.000 went AWOL in Palestine, amongst them men like Yiztak Shamir and Menachem Begin. They created new groups like the Irgun and the Stern Gang; not to fight the Germans who were actively arranging a coup in Baghdad and intended to come down from the Crimea into the Middle East........no Begin's target was the British; to fight them whilst they were at war with the Germans.

As for warnings on the King David, I think it will be found there were none, and that the milk churns with the bombs did quite enough damage to Britons and Jewish civilians to be remembered with accuracy. Other Polish troops did fight through to Breda, and had more a hatred of the Soviets and the Nazis than of the British.

"The nature of the warning, and especially its timing, have been a matter of debate ever since. According to a secret British police report quoted in Bethel, The Palestine Triangle, a warning was received by the hotel operator but was only just being delivered to the British officer in charge as the bomb went off. "

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel

"It is always amusing to see the end results of the syphilitic minds of the anti Semites of the British cahttering classes. Other colonial wars that the UK fought in: Ireland, Kenya, India (1857-58), Afghanistan, South Africa, the Sudan, Cyprus, Malaysia, were far more "

Hey Travis, you are an avowed racist using inflamatory language. So you don't like us iGreat n Britain.....I feel better already. Yes we fought colonial wars and built a great Empire and you missed out most of the countries.....you must be using Readers Digest.

Eat your heart out because we made the world. Without our values there would be no Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, India, or any of thousands of other civilised countries around the world. We are the greatest nation ever to have been seen on the face of the earth and our language is the dominant lingua franca, our playwrights the best known, and our values are more firmly implanted in the United States than any you might adhere to.

Hi Peter,

Not quite sure why you omitted to mention Magna Carta or our historic tradition of Parliamentary government.

Living in exile in London 1726-9, Voltaire could reckon that England was a land of liberty and write that she was the only nation "on earth which has succeeded in controlling the power of kings by resisting them" and had establised "a wise system of government in which the prince . . has his hands tied for doing evil, in which aristocrats are great without arrogance and vassals, and in which the people share in the government without confusion." [quoted from Julian Hoppit: A Land of Libert? - England 1689-1727; OUP (2000)]

Naturally, those more familiar with theocratic and monolithic tendencies have a problem adjusting to political pluralism.

Peter:
and you gave the world the great example of appeasement in the 1930's. You turned Jewish refugees away from Palestine in the 1930's and early 1940's guaranteeing their extermination by the Nazis. You kept 100,000 soldiers in Palestine to keep out a few Holocaust surviors, you gave weapons and training to the genocidal Arabs including having a British commander John Glubb command the Arab Legion of Transjordan. There is no doubt in my mind that the Brits would have exterminated the Palestinians if they had to undergo the trial by blood that the Jews have to go through every day. But don't worry you racist anti Semite, sharia will soon come to the UK and I hope you enjoy it, but first sucicide bombers will go off along Oxford street. And last but not least, you have Red Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London.

Marcus,

Not worthy comment, I feel. And all because you can't swing to the strains of Rule Britannia so unmistakably evident in the comments from Peter and Bob. Are you a surviving member of the Stern Gang?

Marcus,

"and you gave the world the great example of appeasement in the 1930's."

In 1939, Britain's population was 40m, half that of Germany plus Austria. Is it any wonder that those who had horrify experience of the previous World War hesitated before starting what was likely to be another?

Britain had started on rearmament in December 1935 to prepare for the worst:

"The fact is that the rearmament programme was seriously begun under Baldwin, pushed along more slowly than Churchill wanted, but more quickly than the opposition advocated. Defence spending, pegged at about 2.5 per cent of GNP until 1935, increased to 3.8 per cent by 1937." [Peter Clarke: Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-1990; Penguin Books (1997), page 186]

And on 31 March 1939, the British government gave an unsolicited guarantee of Poland's territorial integrity. [Norman Davies: Europe (1996) p. 993] It was in honour of that guarantee which lead Britain into declaring war on Germany on 3 September 1939.

Admittedly it was not enough but we tend now to forget that America stood aloof and did not commit to the European war until the declaration of war by Germany shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan in December 1941. Shirer's judgement in his classic account: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is that but for the declaration of war by Germany, America would not have entered the war in Europe:

"My own impression in Washington at that moment was that it might be difficult for President Roosevelt to get Congress to declare war on Germany. There seemed to be strong feeling in both Houses as well as in the Army and Navy that the country should concentrate its efforst iin defeating Japan and not take on the additional burden of fighting Germany at the same time." [chp. 25]

You're quite right, Marcus, whether it was Pefidious Albion's deliberate failure to assist the doomed Jews of Europe, or the vicious anti-Semitism of the British army in Palestine there was very little to choose between the British and the Nazis.

The fact that 60,000 Jews of Britain fought for the Empire in the war as had their brothers before them in World War I and the Boer war; the fact that the Jews of Palestine had fought courageously for the Empire; the fact of the enormous contribution of Jews to Britain - none of it means a thing to the British.

They oh-so-conveniently also forget that one of the main reasons for the UN voting in favor of a Jewish state was the British army's obscene behaviour in Palestine. Around the world people were sickened by the sight of the brutal British locking up the survivors of Auschwitz and shooting them dead on the beaches and in ships. A torrent of outrage was felt by British as they failed to protect the Jewish population of Palestine and gave free rein to the Arabs in their genocidal campaign against the Jews. The consensus was that the only thing that seperated the British army from the SS was the color of their uniforms, and needless to say the consensus was right.

Every single thing the Jews of Britain have done for their "homeland" has been a definite case of pearls before swine. Their incredible loyalty has been totally misplaced as indeed was the loyalty of the Jews of Germany and Poland before them.

The pro-Europeans are totally correct: the British are truly a part of Europe.

Pooh - don't forget that while the Jewish Brigade fought for the British against the Nazis, the Palestinians were pro Nazi and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini (a relative of that Egpytian faux Palestinian Yasser Arafat) was in Berlin recruiting Balkans Muslims to fight in the S.S. Divisions. Some of the British Generals in the Middle East such as Evelyn Barker were notorious anti Semites, (Bernard Montgomery I suspect was one too).

Bob's answers are laughable. In the teeth of German aggreession the British response was appeasement, appeasement and appeasement - which is exactly why Churchill was in the wilderness for so many years.

Her vehement opposition at two major conferences during the war to do one damn thing for the Jews of Europe; her vicious anti-Semitism; her failure to bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz; even the way she herself fought the Germans, deliberately bombing civilian cities and murdering many thousands of innocent civilians - marks her out as a totally rotten country; a country who had fought the war in spite of and not because of the Jews.

Haj Amin al Husseini actually struck a pact with Hitler to wipe out the Jews of Palestine once the Germans had invaded it. He even visited Auschwitz and exhorted the guards to murder more Jews.

No doubt this makes him a hero to the British.

Guessedworker: I was not born when the Lehi were around. Are you a surviving member of the Black & Tans or of the Mosleyites (British Union of Fascists)? The name of the organization you asswipe referred to was the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (Lehi). Noobdy but the Brits referred to them as the Stern Gang. I noticed that you don't refer to Fatah as The Arafat Gang do you? It must have gotten your bowels in an uproar when the Irgun hanged the two British sergeants after they warned the British authorities not to hange the three Irgun men. Yet the authorities decided to go ahead and hang them thus signing the death warrants for their own men. Also the Irgun warned the British not to flog their memebers, the British did not listen so the Irgun flogged some British soldiers. Measure for measure. As Ben Hecht wrote to the British, "everytime a memebr of the British Army is killed, we all make a little celebration in our hearts." The British ran from Palestine because they were shoked, shocked, that the team at the bottom of the league i.e. 'those contemptible Jews' hanged British soldiers and actually flogged them. Clement Attlee and his Foreign Secreatary Ernest Bevin were two of the biggest losers Britain ever produced.

Thanks Joel. I could not agree with you more.

Pooh,

"In the teeth of German aggreession the British response was appeasement, appeasement and appeasement - which is exactly why Churchill was in the wilderness for so many years."

Years? C'mon, you seriously need to revise your grasp of history. The notorious Munich Agreement was signed 29 September 1938. Once Chamberlain, prime minister from May 1937 on, came to realise that Hitler was not to be trusted after German forces had completed the take over of Czecho-Slovakia in March 1939, the British government offered an unsolicited guarantee of Poland's territorial integrity at the end of March, six months later.

Britain was ill-prepared to support and fight a land war on mainland Europe even by the late 1930s and the basic fact was that its population, a fundamental resource in land war, was half that of the populations of Germany with Austria before taking account of whatever human and industrial resources might be engaged and mobilised on mainland Europe. On starting rearmament in December 1935, Britain's government had not thereafter rearmed at anything like the pace of Germany. Increasingly, air defence was given priority in military spending on the premise that Britain, largely urbanised with a high population density, was especially vulnerable to bombing from the air.

Churchill was in the wilderness for many years because he was regarded as a thorough going maverick by Conseravtive governments during the 1930s on many isssues besides the scale of Britain's rearmament.

"In the Baldwinian Conservative Party Churchill had too many strikes against him: ambitious, untrustworthy, impetuous, adventurous and tainted with unworthy associates, from Lloyd George to Birkenhead and Beaverbrook. Not only had he clung to Free Trade on rejoining a basically protectionist party, his Chancellorship [1924-9] was subsequently regarded as an electoral disaster. . . The issue on which Churchill broke with the Conservative leadership, and on which he campaigned throughout the early 1930s, was India. He emerged as the most forecful spokeman for the diehard wing of the Conservative Party, which saw an all-party front-bench conspiracy to sell the British Raj down the river. . . Throughout, Churchill put himself at the head of of the 100 or more Conservative MPs who regularly voted against the government." [Peter Clarke: Hope and Glory (1997), p.182-]

In championing the cause of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936, Churchill was again at odds with Baldwin, Chamberlain's predecessor as prime minister. It is only in recent years that we have come to know something of the extent of the Nazi inclinations and associations of Edward and his wife or, as they became on his abdication and marriage, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The substantive reasons for questioning Churchill's judgement on a range of issues tended to weaken his credibility in urging early and faster rearmament after Hitler came to power in January 1933. It is facile now, with the benefit of hindsight, to see Chamberlain and his government as gullible or weak but few in those times in Britain with experience of the fallout from WW1 wanted to recognise the inevitability of another war that was to cost the lives of upwards of 50 million people by the time it ended.

America stood aloof from all this and only entered the European war following the declaration of war by Germany in December 1941, after Pearl Harbor. The facts belie claims that America entered the war to save Europe from the tyranny of fascism. Britain stood as a lone bastion in Europe from the fall of France in May 1940 through to the German invasion of the Soviet Union at the end of June the following year and Stalin was hardly regarded as a dependable ally with the scale of the Ukraine famine 1932-3, the gulags and the show trials from 1936 on. Indeed, the Soviet Union had signed a Friendship Treaty with Nazi Germany in late September 1939 after Britain and France were already at war.

On the face of it, there was little to choose between the two totalitarian tyrannies. Attacking the Soviet Union was a major strategic blunder on Hitler's part. It would have made better sense from his perspective to have first consolidated hold of mainland western Europe and mobilised its resources before opening a second front on the east. A second strategic blunder was in declaring war on America after Pearl Harbor. As we have seen above, Shirer located in Washington doubted that America would otherwise have committed to the war in Europe. In the period, Britain's government had to address the contingency that Hitler was not going to make those blunders.

Yes Bob, the United States was notable for its Neutrality Acts and its pusillanimous approach hen the Japanese sank the USS Panay on 12 December 1937 and Congress passed The Ludlow Amendment requiring a referendum before the US could go to war !!!!!

Appeasement ? It was a sensible policy. Britain offered Hitler a £1 bn loan in 1938; he was broke, instead he invaded Austria, because he was a demon. Still, we did try the peaceful route before resorting to war. You might note Britain was not well armed in 1938, and losing everything at Dunkirk....the US kindly 'sold' us some WW1 weapons so we could fight the Germans who would invade in Operation Sea Lion.

Unlike Israel Britain never got free handouts of weapons; it had to pay its own way to survive. Why do you expect Britain should open up Palestine to Jews from Europe ? Why ? It was a League mandate, and it was not an open-door.....far better to go to the USA where immigrants are welcomed and neutrality would provide safety from the rough times in Europe.

The real problem you have Marcus, is that the Jewish community leaders betrayed their people. The Warburgs and the Kuhn Loebs arranged loans from New York; the organisation of ghettoes was in the hands of Jewish leaders; the arrangements to get to the station on time for transportation were all handled by Jewish community groups.

You just cannot get over the fact that the Nazis did have 'willing helpers' as Daniel Goldhagen likes to go on about, and they weren't Gentiles ! Do read "The Pianist", at least Szpilman got to see 'solidarity' in action in the ghetto.

The way you rant about people in Britain, you would think Israel is a harmonious land of communal bliss...no Gentiles.....must be super. So read Ha'aretz today about the corruption througout the country, about Sharon's sons, and the lies told by the IDF about weapons deployed. Stop using us as a scapegoat for your own inadequacy and stand on your own feet as we had to do against Hitler.

Still, we should be grateful. Fewer people died in Istanbul in either bombing in the last few days in Istanbul than died at the King David Hotel.

"Her vehement opposition at two major conferences during the war to do one damn thing for the Jews of Europe; her vicious anti-Semitism; her failure to bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz; even the way she herself fought the"

Yes Pooh, I do wish we could have bombed the whole of Auschwitz so the 24 year old Soviet Captain would not be the first person gassed there. Could you tell me which aircraft could have flown across Germany in 1941 and over Poland to Oscwiecim ?

I am at a loss to know which super aircraft you mean ?

The United States was neutral and had no Boeing Superfortress at that stage; and the RAF had NO aircaft with such a range. Just where do you get fed this canard.

Moreover, why wqas the US neutral while 3.5 million Poles were murdered ?

I am looking forward to Pooh's response as to which aircraft would have been used to bomb the railways tracks. As a telling example of not letting the facts get in the way of one's paranoid fantasy it takes some beating.

Bob and Peter, you seem well informed about the period; in addition to the collaborators were there any notable resistance movements, in Poland, fighting the Nazis internally at the time?

Yes in Poland there were NO collaborators but an active ZWZ/AK underground. The penalty for helping any Jew (unique in Occupied Europe) in Poland was that ALL the persons in the house/apartment block would go to a concentration camp.

10.000 Poles were executed....go to Pawiak in Warsaw and see the lists. Read 'Forgotten Holocaust' by Richard C. Lukas CH 5, 6

Witold Pilecki filed a report on Auschwitz having entered the camp and exited, he was in the underground. Jews were first sent there March 1942, gassing first May 1942...the team doing the gassing had been at Hadamar in Hesse where they were gassing the disabled and mentally ill under the T-4 Euthanasia Program.

Polish Underground gave Britain details of V-2 rockets,

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