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Arabs and Jews, in terms of the thief-ocracy, worked hand in hand, and it's too bad that in politics they don't find a way to get along just as well! Even politicians got into debating why the Israeli and Palestinian mafias got along like brothers.
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Rédoine Faïd (Outlaw: Author Armed & Dangerous)
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Thanks to the media and the politicians—two of the worst agents for dumbing down and blinding Israeli society—we learned that the Arabs were born to kill, the whole world is against us, anti-Semitism determines how Israel is dealt with and there is no connection between our actions and the price we pay.
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Gideon Levy (The Punishment of Gaza)
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Today, these documents of complaint read more as an attempt by ‘sensitive’ Jewish
politicians and soldiers to absolve their consciences. They form part of an Israeli ethos that can best be described as ‘shoot and cry’, the title of a collection of expressions of supposedly moral remorse by Israeli soldiers
who had participated in a small-scale ethnic cleansing operation in the June 1967 war.
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Ilan Pappé (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine)
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So it's 2019. I'm gonna say the right thing to do is for the US to declare bankruptcy (Trump can do it… done it before…), and dismantle the criminal state of Israel as it exists today. Unfortunately, politicians are so full of shit and AIPAC money, and the economy is so addicted to war, and the US population is so fucking stupid... that we’ll probably have to go and try to fuck up another two or three countries before moving on to a decent, honest life.
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Dmitry Dyatlov
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Although Israel is targeted by terrorists much more frequently than the United States, Israelis do not live in fear of terrorism. A 2012 survey of Israeli Jews found that only 16 percent described terrorism as their greatest fear81—no more than the number who said they were worried about Israel’s education system. No Israeli politician would say outright that he tolerates small-scale terrorism, but that’s essentially what the country does. It tolerates it because the alternative—having everyone be paralyzed by fear—is incapacitating and in line with the terrorists’ goals. A key element in the country’s strategy is making life as normal as possible for people after an attack occurs. For instance, police typically try to clear the scene of an attack within four hours of a bomb going off,82 letting everyone get back to work, errands, or even leisure. Small-scale terrorism is treated more like crime than an existential threat. What Israel certainly does not tolerate is the potential for large-scale terrorism (as might be made more likely, for instance, by one of their neighbors acquiring weapons of mass destruction). There is some evidence that their approach is successful: Israel is the one country that has been able to bend Clauset’s curve. If we plot the fatality tolls from terrorist incidents in Israel using the power-law method (figure 13-8), we find that there have been significantly fewer large-scale terror attacks than the power-law would predict; no incident since 1979 has killed more than two hundred people. The fact that Israel’s power-law graph looks so distinct is evidence that our strategic choices do make some difference.
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Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't)
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TO ACHIEVE THE peace between Israel and Arab states we had overcome many obstacles, none more enduring than the obsessive belief in the centrality of the Palestinian issue and the need to achieve a Palestinian-Israeli peace before any other peace could be made. John Kerry, like so many others, had held that belief, and he expressed it in December 2016 during a conference in Washington attended by many of my political opponents, invited especially from Israel to hear it: There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you. I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying “Well, the Arab world is in a different place now, we just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world and we’ll deal with the Palestinians.” No, no, no and no… There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everyone needs to understand that. That is a hard reality. When Kerry finished delivering his remarks, he received thunderous applause. It was only by breaking out of this flawed way of thinking, however, that true progress was made. In its first seventy-two years, Israel made peace with two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan. In the span of four months, Israel had made peace with four more. By building Israel’s power and challenging Iran, we had made Israel an attractive ally to our Arab neighbors. By bypassing the Palestinians, we could now achieve four diplomatic breakthroughs and sign four historic agreements. This was truly a New Middle East, one built on real strength and no false illusions.
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Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi: My Story)
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The US administration constantly sought to advance its misplaced messianic quest for a magical peace via “courageous” acts on the part of Israel’s leaders, even if these acts meant political suicide. Would American presidents consider taking “courageous actions,” such as, to use a historical example, far-reaching concessions to the Soviet Union if Congress could remove them from office the next day? Of course not. Yet this didn’t prevent American presidents and their envoys from attempting to tutor Israeli prime ministers, especially me, about the need for “courage” and “leadership.” I was being lectured about courage from people who had neither risked their own lives in war nor their political lives. When such “leadership” wasn’t forthcoming from me, this was proof of a clear failure of character by a politician guided solely by cynical and personal interests. The conflict between national necessity and political survival is as old as democracy itself, but it didn’t apply here. What stood in the way of the concessions I was pressed to make was simply my belief that they would greatly endanger Israel. So why make them? This too has eluded many American pundits. They might have noted that when I did believe certain measures were vital for Israel’s future, I didn’t hesitate to take them.
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Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi: My Story)
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Her voice was impatient with rage. ‘They say the only deterrent to terror is to kill terrorists. It’s the same argument that dictators have made to murder opponents throughout history. Say it whatever way you want – whether it comes from the mouth of a dictator or as an excuse to repress people of different political views – it’s the same old serpent.’ Halima swept her hand across the evening. ‘All this violence. The idea that killing people solves problems. War is all they know, and they are good at it, so they kill people thinking that war will bring peace. It never brings peace. There is only a pause in the war.’ She was quiet for a moment, struggling with her indignation. ‘They are not a kind people. Some are kind, some are wise, but not the politicians. The opposite of kindness is not cruelty. It is indifference. All this’ – she looked across the bombed city – ‘is indifference. Our suffering isn’t about who we are. It is about who they are. Airplanes and tanks give them the power to be indifferent.’ She sipped her drink, and her voice lowered and softened. ‘Israel’s prime ministers – Sharon, Olmert, Netanyahu – believe they can solve these problems with toughness, but things have changed. The Islamic faith has spread. For better or worse.’ Her hand went to her heart. When she spoke again, her soprano voice was strident. ‘How will they frighten jihadists who love martyrdom?’ She shook her head. ‘God forbid.’ ‘You’re wrong,’ Analise said. ‘Not all Israelis are that way.’ ‘Je le croirai, guard je le verrai.’ She paused. ‘Let them show it.’ She waved dismissively. ‘Beirut survived the Romans, the Ottomans, the French. The land and the people endure. That land has defeated stronger enemies than Israel. Israel is an idea. Ideas come and go. Land endures.’ She lowered her head and looked out at the darkened city. Her words came in quiet lament. ‘The scourge of this land is the curse of revenge.
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Paul Vidich (Beirut Station)
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For the first time ever, a viable mainstream candidate was offering a distinct critique of Israeli actions. Sanders managed to emerge from all of it unscathed. And while his pursuit of the Democratic nomination ultimately came up short, his stated positions on Israel were not generally among the dominant explanations for his loss—whether from the public, pundits, or politicians.2
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Marc Lamont Hill (Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics)
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As we touched on earlier, this causes a dramatic underestimate of the true rate of ownership in Israel and Switzerland. Both the Israeli and Swiss governments issue guns to civilians, while the government still technically owns the guns. In Israel, the government owns most guns, and people apply to have them issued. In Switzerland, all able-bodied Swiss males between the ages of 18 and 34 keep military weapons in their homes.46 After age 34, they can apply for permission to keep their military weapons, and the majority opts to do so.
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John Lott (Gun Control Myths: How politicians, the media, and botched "studies" have twisted the facts on gun control)
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Despite the mystique that surrounds it, and the understandable impulse to treat it as aberrant behavior beyond politics, torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious. A tool of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability whenever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks the consent needed to rule: Marcos in the Philippines, the shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, the French in Algeria, the Israelis in the occupied territories, the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. The list could stretch on and on. The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system-whether political, religious, or economic- that is rejected by the people they are ruling.
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Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)
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A rare moment of Israeli political honesty came in October 2021 when far-right Israeli parliamentarian Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party and ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said in the Knesset to the Arab members, “You’re only here by mistake, because [founding prime minister David] Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job, didn’t throw you out in ’48.” It was an acknowledgment that ethnic cleansing took place in 1948, albeit delivered by one of the most racist and homophobic Israeli politicians.
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Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
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Israel’s response to Covid-19 was unprecedented in the Western world. It used its internal security service, the Shin Bet, to track and monitor potential Covid cases (though it had been secretly collecting all mobile phone metadata since at least 200262) and follow social media posts for any evidence of social gatherings. There was an outcry among the Israeli media class and some politicians, angered that a system designed to oppress Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem could be turned on Israeli Jews. Not that any of them said this outright, but the implication was clear: do what you want to monitor Palestinians with the Shin Bet and make their lives hell but do not use it on us.63 There was also silence about Israel’s export of surveillance tools to regimes around the world, with many Israeli critics unable or unwilling to make the connection with the nation’s Covid-19 response and the companies tasked to do it having had years of experience selling these tools to dictatorships and democracies
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Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
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The Arab minority in Israel had never quite managed to realize its full electoral potential. Voter turnout was routinely lower than that of the Jewish Israelis, whether because of a lack of trust in their own politicians or cynicism about the system.
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Isabel Kershner (The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul)
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Israel is the USA in disguise. An other successful way the west is conquering an other Middle East country. Politicians from the right and from the left support Israel because it's an other colony of the west. Since when the right wingers supports the Jews? You see the true faces when this things happen. All the celebrities in support of Israel goes to show who controls the media.
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Kaia Chanel
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Other laws were explicitly created to ensure that Israel remained a sovereign Jewish refuge, chief among them the Law of Return, guaranteeing Jews the automatic right to immigrate and become Israeli citizens, as well as anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent, and their spouses. There was no such law for Palestinians. Yet the more divisive Israeli politics became, and the more Arab politicians became targets of toxic, right-wing discourse, the more Arab voters were shaken out of their apathy.
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Isabel Kershner (The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul)
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What about Jerusalem? When discussing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, pundits and politicians often tell us that Jerusalem is one of the holy cities of Islam—indeed, its third holiest city, right after Mecca and Medina. But in reality, the Islamic claim to Jerusalem is extremely tenuous, based only on a legendary journey of Muhammad—a journey that is at best a dream and at worst a fabrication. The Koran refers to this journey only obliquely and in just one place; Islamic tradition fills in the details and connects Jerusalem with the words of the Koran. But the Koran itself never mentions Jerusalem even once—an exceptionally inconvenient fact for Muslims who claim that the Palestinians must have a share of Jerusalem because the city is sacred to Islam. Muhammad’s famous Night Journey is the basis of the Islamic claim to Jerusalem. The Koran’s sole reference to this journey appears in the first verse of sura 17, which says that Allah took Muhammad from “the Sacred Mosque” in Mecca “to the farthest [al-aqsa] Mosque.” There was no mosque in Jerusalem at this time, so the “farthest” mosque probably wasn’t really the one that now bears that name in Jerusalem, the Al-Aqsa mosque located on the Temple Mount. Nevertheless, Islamic tradition is firm that this mosque was in Jerusalem.
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Robert Spencer (The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran)
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Etgar Keret, an Israeli novelist, said he had been troubled by some of the terms favored by journalists, politicians and even friends in Tel Aviv. There is no Hebrew word for ‘‘assassination,’’ Mr. Keret said, so killings of Hamas operatives are described with a phrase meaning ‘‘focused obstruction.’’ Instead of ‘‘civilians,’’ he said, slain children and women are sometimes called ‘‘uninvolved.’’ ‘‘There’s something about this ‘uninvolved,’ there’s something passive about it,’’ Mr. Keret said. ‘‘You admit that he is not somebody who is trying to destroy you, but you don’t give him any other identification. It was not a child who wanted to learn how to play the piano,’’ he said, adding, ‘‘it was just somebody who didn’t shoot at us.
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Anonymous
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One of the biggest obstacles on the path of peace, or even peaceful coexistence, between Israelis and Palestinians was placed by the international community and media when it redefined Hamas as an "organization." One result is that outsiders try to reach a solution based on the assumption that Hamas has structure and leaders. It does not. It has no "political wing" or "militant wing." Hamas is a loosely-knit band of terrorists. Its leaders are whoever has weapons, plans, and influence. Hamas is thuggish and cowardly. Those who fly the green flag are not military combatants. Nor do they represent, or care a whit, for the Palestinian people, as evidenced by their strategy of hiding in and fighting from schools, clinics, hospitals, and people's homes. After what passed for an election some Hamas terrorists were further redefined as politicians and diplomats, though they were neither politic nor diplomatic, evidenced by the fact that many "govern" from Israeli prisons. Prior to the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, Hamas had been emasculated and nearly eradicated by Yassir Arafat, who rounded up, disarmed, and imprisoned the terrorist "leaders," leaving its remaining members to return to their homes. Arafat ensured that members of Hamas had no place to hide among the Palestinian people. And that is the only way the terrorist cancer in Gaza will be excised today. In the absence of Arafat, the task falls by default to Israel, which would do better to enable the citizens of Gaza to purge themselves of Hamas and reward them for doing so than try to get rid of the bad apples by blowing up the barrel, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor.
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Ron Brackin
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The antagonism sparked by Netanyahu, I gradually noticed, resembled that traditionally triggered by the Jews. We were always the ultimate Other—communists in the view of the capitalists and capitalists in communist eyes, nationalists for the cosmopolitans and, for jingoists, the International Jew. So, too, was Netanyahu declaimed as “reckless” by White House sources and incapable of decision making by many Israelis. He was branded intransigent by The New York Times, yet Haaretz faulted him for never taking a stand. Washington insiders assailed him for being out of touch with America, and the Tel Aviv branja—the intellectual elite—snubbed him for being too American. The Israeli right lambasted him for spinelessness, the left for intractability, the Ultra-Orthodox for heresy, and the secular for pandering to rabbis. All agreed in labeling Netanyahu disingenuous, imperious, and paralyzed by paranoia—qualities not uncommon among politicians.
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Michael B. Oren (Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide)
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In 2008 I visited Israel and spent time in Muslim towns and villages meeting clerics, politicians, and young Muslim men wearing distinctly Israel Defense Forces trousers. At every meeting I asked a blunt question: “As a Muslim, do you feel you live in an apartheid state?” Invariably, the answer was a firm no. As one man in his twenties, in the northern town of Shibli (where a sign reading “Allahu Akbar” graces the entrance), told me, “Wallah al azeem” – as God is my witness – “I will never wish to trade my Israeli citizenship for any of those wretched Arab countries who do not know how to treat their own citizens with dignity.” I asked the same question of Imam Mohammad Odeh outside his spectacular mosque north of Haifa. He grinned before admitting, “We Muslims have difficulties, there is no doubt, and we feel Israel should end the occupation of the West Bank, but to say we Muslims are living in an apartheid state is a lie.” After a tour of the mosque, where we prayed, he invited me to his home. What followed was a long, heartfelt story of a Palestinian living as an Israeli citizen, the imam of a mosque and leader of a community of two thousand. Hurt was written on his face, but his complaints were aimed not at Israel but towards the intellectual bankruptcy of the men who lead the Palestinians. I asked him if he truly, in his heart, felt Israeli, and without hesitating he said, “Yes.
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Tarek Fatah (The Jew is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism)
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We see reports of our devastated, impoverished brethren being bombarded by a modern, superior military. We watch in horror as young and old alike die for simply being present. We see Israeli politicians hold demonstrations chanting "There are no innocents in Gaza!"
I don't know if I can explain how it feels to know that the person holding the gun to your head sees you as a worthless animal.
I don't know if I can explain how it feels to see Israel drop a bomb and massacre an entire family, all while saying it was targeting a terrorist that no one in the neighborhood has ever heard of...or that any one of us would have traded places with the four children who were there.
This is who we are. I've tried to explain it. It might sound tragic, but don't feel bad for us. We have a connection to each other you might not ever understand. We smile and laugh more than you think. And somehow, we still fall asleep with a heart full of warmth, justice, and hope.
When we wake up, that hole in our heart is back again. But just like you, we live another day.
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Amer Zahr (Being Palestinian Makes Me Smile)
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The country now has a consensual government that enjoys wide public support, and wants to determine by force the future of the remaining 20 percent. It has, as have all its predecessors, from Labor and Likud alike, resorted to settlement as the best means for doing this. This entails the destruction of an independent Palestinian infrastructure. These politicians sense—and they may not be wrong in this—that the public mood in Israel would allow them to go even further, should they wish to do so. They could emulate the ethnic cleansing of 1948, this time not only by driving the Palestinians out of the occupied territories, but, if necessary, also driving out the one million Palestinians living within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. In such an atmosphere, then, the Nakbah is not so much denied in Israel as cherished.
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Noam Chomsky (Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on the U.S.-Israeli War on the Palestinians)
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Overcoming cognitive dissonance is hard work. This is why The New York Times described Gaza as being under Israeli military occupation for years, long after the Israeli army withdrew. This is why Amnesty International described Israel as an apartheid state at a time in which an Arab political party was part of Israel’s coalition government. And this is why numerous left-wing media outlets and politicians denied that Hamas terrorists committed rape on October 7, even as those same terrorists admitted on tape that they did.
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Uri Kaufman (American Intifada: Israel, the Gaza War and the New Antisemitism)
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American political science research and is meant to cater to basic American positions and stances on the issue. Most users of the language that surrounds the two-state solution as the ideal settlement are probably sincere when employing it. This language has helped Western diplomats and politicians remain ineffective—either out of will or necessity—in the face of continuing Israeli oppression. Expressions and phrases like “a land for two people,” “the peace process,” “the Israel-Palestine conflict,” “the need to stop the violence on both sides,” “negotiations,” or “the two-state solution” come straight out of a contemporary version of Orwell’s 1984.
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Noam Chomsky (On Palestine)
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There is already too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice; powerful men have always made their massacres seem necessary and righteous. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a triumphant conclusion to the Israeli onslaught, or its retrospective sanitising by historians and journalists as well as politicians.
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Pankaj Mishra (The World After Gaza)
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It is a kind of catharsis for both the Lebanese and the Palestinians who have long understood the way in which these dreadful events should be interpreted. Victories were the result of courage, of patriotism or revolutionary conviction. Defeats were always caused by the plot: The Plot, the mo’amera, the complot, undefinable and ubiquitous, a conspiracy of treachery in which a foreign hand – Syrian, Palestinian, Israeli, American, French, Libyan, Iranian – was always involved. Edward Cody of the AP and I once came to the conclusion that in every interview we conducted in Lebanon, a special chair should be set aside for The Plot – since The Plot invariably played a leading role in all discussions we ever had with politicians, diplomats or gunmen.
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Robert Fisk (Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War)
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The invasion of Gaza served as a bonanza for right-wing political mobilization, catalyzing an ultra-nationalist march through the institutions of the Jewish state. The right-wing's wartime success represented the culmination of the process the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling of Hebrew University called "politicide," or the calculated destruction of part or an entire community of people in order to deny them self-determination.
"Murders, localized massacres, the elimination of leadership and elite groups, the physical destruction of public institutions and infrastructure, land colonization, starvation, social and political isolation, re-education, and partial ethnic cleansing are the major tools used to achieve this goal," Kimmerling wrote in his classic 2003 biography of Ariel Sharon, the rightist war-nor politician and then-Prime Minister he cast as the architect
of the practice.
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Max Blumenthal (The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza)