Uzi Arad: “We want to relieve ourselves of the burden of the Palestinian populations – not territories.”

March 19, 2009

Yesterday Israel arrested ten Palestinian political leaders in the West Bank:

Among those detained were four Hamas lawmakers, a university professor and a former Hamas deputy prime minister.

They are taking hostage to press Hamas for the release of a prisoner of war, Gilad Shalit, Hamas is holding in Gaza. The weekend negotiations about Shalit’s release failed. While Israel agreed to release some of the several thousand of Palestinians it holds without any judicial process in exchange for the release of Shalit, it insisted on deporting those into some foreign country. Hamas could of course not agree with that.

So now Israel increases the pressure by taking more non-militant civilians hostages and a further blockade of the 1.5 million people in Gaza.

Worse is to come. The incoming Netanjahu/Avigor Lieberman government is at the extreme right of the political spectrum. Netanjahu selected as national security adviser Uzi Arad, a former(?) Israeli spy who is currently not allowed to enter the United States for spying against it. Recently Netanjahu snubbed Hillary Clinton when he insisted on Arad’s presence in a meeting with her.

Next to being a spy Arad is also a fascist. I am exaggerating? No. Via War in Context a video of an interview a settler friendly TV station did with him.

Uzi Arad on the two-state solution:

I don’t think that one has to go that far because at the end of the day, I don’t think the majority of Israelis want to see themselves responsible for the Palestinians. We do not want to control the Palestinian population. It’s unnecessary. What we do want is to care for our borders, for the Jewish settlements and for areas which are unpopulated and to have our security interests served well. But also to take under our responsibility these populations which, believe me, are not the most productive on earth, would become a burden. We want to relieve ourselves of the burden of the Palestinian populations – not territories. It is territory we want to preserve, but populations we want to rid ourselves of.

The full interview is below the fold. The above quote is at 8:30, but the rest like his perverse understanding of ‘democracy’ is certainly also of interest.

There was a time when some my ancestors wanted to rid themselves of the “burden” of a certain population they vilified based on race and religion. We know how that ended. Never again? Not if Uzi Arad gets his way.

Posted by b on March 19, 2009 at 14:14 UTC | Permalink

Comments

That’s not fascist, that’s sub-creature. Golum. Kill on sight as gift to humanity.
Speaking of gifts to humanity:
War Shills McCain and Lieberman warn Obama against
lowering US’ Afghan war profit goals
Washington, March 19: Two powerful US Senators, Joe Lieberman and John McCain, have cautioned President Barack Obama against lowering American war profit goals in Afghanistan, saying a “minimalist” approach as suggested by some quarters could be counterproductive.
“It is dangerously and fundamentally wrong to miss the opportunity for greater war profiteering, and Obama should unambiguously reject it,” Senator McCain, the Republican Presidential candidate in 2008 Presidential election, wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. The piece was authored jointly by his Democratic colleague in the Senate, Joe Lieberman.
“As the administration finalizes its policy review, we are troubled by calls in some quarters for the president to adopt a ‘minimalist’ approach toward making lots of money in Afghanistan,” said McCain and Lieberman, known in Defense circles as the “Twins”.
Observing that the political and tax savings allure of such a reductionist approach is obvious, the opinion piece said it is also dangerously and fundamentally wrong, and the President should unambiguously reject it.
“Let there be no doubt: the war in Afghanistan can be won. Success — a stable, secure, self-governing Afghanistan that is not a terrorist sanctuary — can be achieved, and we can all make one hell of a lot of money off of this one,” the Senators argued.
“Just as in Iraq, there is no shortcut to massive war profiteering, no clever “middle way” that allows us to achieve more by doing less. We have to keep increasing the Defense budget, and calling for more and more emergency war funding bills, for Iraq, for Afghanistan, and for other undisclosed national security purposes,” they emphasized. “That’s where the real war profit is made!”
Bureau Report

Posted by: Toto Tew | Mar 19 2009 15:31 utc | 1

Im surprised that no one is making a big deal of the admission by Israeli soldiers of the murder of women and children in Gaza
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7952603.stm

Posted by: mo | Mar 19 2009 15:44 utc | 2

@mo – I had read that on Haartez: IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement

“The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn’t understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he … he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders.”
…
Another squad leader from the same brigade told of an incident where the company commander ordered that an elderly Palestinian woman be shot and killed; she was walking on a road about 100 meters from a house the company had commandeered.
…
“And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to … I don’t know how to describe it …. The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way,” he said.

– the full transcript will be published tomorrow and I’ll save my rage for that. What’s new with it anyway? They only admit what we already know.

Posted by: b | Mar 19 2009 16:18 utc | 3

Whats good about it is that we can use it to shut the mouths of the hasbara from repeating all that “moral light unto the nations IDF” crap they keep peddling.
I didn’t knwo there was a full transcript coming out. Thanks. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it because it means revisitng the deaths of so many children, but at least its something we can use to show what the IDF really is.

Posted by: mo | Mar 19 2009 16:39 utc | 4

Mo, I guess the reason for there not being more outcry over these confessions is that no one is surprised anymore, quite the opposite, we expected it or knew it all along. Haaretz has this on the issue:

IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement
During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property, say soldiers who fought in the offensive.
[…] The testimonies include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her two children. “There was a house with a family inside …. We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof,” the soldier said.
“The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn’t understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he … he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders.”[…]

The day apartheid USrael vanquishes from the pages of history can’t come soon enough.

Posted by: Juan Moment | Mar 19 2009 16:54 utc | 5

I realise that Juan. But you can bet that if this was admitted to or discovered about Hamas or Hizballah the hasbara would be crowing from every rooftop (or blog top anyway). We need to to do the same so they can never go on about how supposedly moral their terrorist forces are.

Posted by: mo | Mar 19 2009 17:00 utc | 6

as peak oil and global warming loom, israelis are getting desperate,
so desperate, in fact, that a prominent israeli, dror, founder of the JPPPI, argues in the forward that jews should abandon their morals in defense of israel… which causes a certain amount of consternation among jews outside israel…
how can this lunatic neocon fringe fella speak for all jews?
it’s bad enough that the chairman of the JPPPI, dennis ross, has been chosen as some high-flying envoy to the middle east…
but maybe this dror guy just admitting what’s been obvious all along: israelis and israeli americans and their fellow travelers will abandon their morals and lie their behinds off if they figure it will advance their project to secure israel.
now then… do americans have some moral obligation to believe israeli lies, or what?

Posted by: wadosy | Mar 19 2009 17:16 utc | 7

motives:

trigger motive
long-term motive

Posted by: wadosy | Mar 19 2009 17:20 utc | 8

morals, huh?
as peak oil and global warming loom, israelis are getting too desperate for morals.
so desperate, in fact, that a prominent israeli, dror, founder of the JPPPI, argues in the forward that jews should abandon their morals in defense of israel… which causes a certain amount of consternation among jews outside israel…
how can this lunatic neocon fringe fella speak for all jews?
it’s bad enough that the chairman of the JPPPI, dennis ross, has been chosen as some high-flying envoy to the middle east…
but maybe this dror guy just admitting what’s been obvious all along: israelis and israeli americans and their fellow travelers will abandon their morals and lie their behinds off if they figure it will advance their project to secure israel.
now then… do americans have some moral obligation to believe israeli lies, or what?

Posted by: wadosy | Mar 19 2009 17:28 utc | 9

Lebanon’s Daily Star has an article pointing to one of the roots for the problem, European and US complicity.

The forked-tongue eunuchs and Israel
By Rami G. Khouri
If rhetoric is the first step toward action, then one of the rhetorical trends of our time indicating a giant step backward toward inaction is the American and European tendency to describe Israel’s aggressive and illegal actions in the occupied Palestinian territories in increasingly soft and imprecise terms.
For years, US administrations called Israeli settlements “illegal” and an “obstacle to peace,” but in recent years those terms have been replaced by a mere “unhelpful.” On her first official trip to the region earlier this month, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton referred to the Israeli demolition of Palestinian Arab homes in East Jerusalem as “unhelpful.” Earlier this week, the European Union presidency said that Israel’s demolition of homes in the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem “threatens the viability of a comprehensive, just and lasting settlement, in conformity with international law.”
If I were the Israeli government, I would be laughing all the way to my next colonial adventure in destroying Palestinian homes and infrastructure, uprooting Palestinian Arabs and replacing them with imported settlers from Israel, or Brooklyn, or Russia, or from wherever the world’s longest running modern colonization venture gets its human ammunition and reinforcements.
It is bad enough when two of the world’s powerhouses pull back from their previous positions of branding Israel’s contraventions of international law and United Nations resolutions as illegal and impermissible and instead call them “unhelpful” or just a threat to a lasting settlement. It is infinitely worse when the United States and the European Union, who spend half their waking hours trying to spread democracy and the rule of law to the rest of the world, end up watering down Israeli contraventions of international law so that Israel spends half its waking hours laughing at every American and European official in sight. […]

If it weren’t for these spineless bastards enabling the Zionist wet dream we are forced to witness, in all its cruelty and sadism, Israel’s forces would not be able to get away with these crimes against humanity. And as long as we re-elect those soul-sucking jerks over and over improvements in the lives of people holding out in Palestine will not be forthcoming.
Blind Freddy knew that Obama & Hillary would fight on the side of the Nazionists for their beloved greater Israel, would supply them with arms and money to run their horrendous murder campaigns against defenceless civilians; long before the election this was known. But still he got elected. So lets not act surprised, a shark does what a shark does.
Same here in Australia, the centrist labour government is a disgrace. Standing by with approving nods while the Gazan’s were bombed to hell, only to then be seen as generous for donating a few million to the reconstruction effort needed to repair the annihilated sewerage system. But hey, this is apparently as good as it gets. What truly shameful times we live in.

Posted by: Juan Moment | Mar 19 2009 17:33 utc | 10

Wonder what the fall-out will be when I start wearing my lapel button of an Israeli flag, with a red slash through it.

Posted by: IntelVet | Mar 19 2009 18:17 utc | 11

Ben Bernanke on the apartheid bailout:
I don’t think that one has to go that far because at the end of the day, I don’t think the majority of global capital elites want to see themselves responsible for the People. We do not want to control the People. It’s unnecessary. What we do want is to care for our bonuses, for our Class A shares settlements and for market areas which are deregulated and to have our mercenary interests served well. But also to take under our responsibility these People which, believe me, are not the most productive on earth, would become a burden to our bottom line. We want to relieve ourselves of the burden of the People – not property, not capital. It is real estate and profits we want to preserve, but the Lower Class we want to rid ourselves of. There are plenty of takers waiting.

Posted by: Tippy Canoe | Mar 19 2009 18:39 utc | 12

b, could you check your first link, it leads back to this thread.

Posted by: annie | Mar 19 2009 19:52 utc | 13

@annie – @13 – thanks – corrected the link now.
—
in other news …
US Army Confirms Israeli Nukes; Israeli Aid At Stake

The Army has let slip one of the worst-kept secrets in the world — that Israel has the bomb.
Officially, the United States has a policy of “ambiguity” regarding Israel’s nuclear capability. Essentially, it has played a game by which it neither acknowledges nor denies that Israel is a nuclear power.
But a Defense Department study [http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2008/JOE2008.pdf] completed last year offers what may be the first time in a unclassified report that Israel is a nuclear power. On page 37 of the U.S. Joint Forces Command report, the Army includes Israel within “a growing arc of nuclear powers running from Israel in the west through an emerging Iran to Pakistan, India, and on to China, North Korea, and Russia in the east.”
The single reference is far more than the U.S. usually would state publicly about Israel, even though the world knew Israel to be a nuclear power years before former nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu went public with facts on its weapons program in 1986.

Posted by: b | Mar 19 2009 20:13 utc | 14

@IntelVet @11 – Wonder what the fall-out will be when I start wearing my lapel button of an Israeli flag, with a red slash through it.
I’m preparing car stickers now saying “Boycott Apartheid” with an Israeli flag overlayed with a restricted parking zone sign between those words. I wonder how long it will take until my car then sees some damage (if at all). Quite unsure about that …

Posted by: b | Mar 19 2009 20:51 utc | 15

Sign me up for a sticker.
Really.

Posted by: beq | Mar 20 2009 0:33 utc | 16

Transcript of the Israeli soldiers accounts on operating in Gaza.

“At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then … I call this murder … in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified – we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?
“From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn’t fled. I didn’t really understand: On the one hand they don’t really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they’re telling us they hadn’t fled so it’s their fault … This also scared me a bit.
…
One of my soldiers came to me and asked, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘What isn’t clear? We don’t want to kill innocent civilians.’ He goes, ‘Yeah? Anyone who’s in there is a terrorist, that’s a known fact.’ I said, ‘Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.’ He says, ‘That’s clear,’ and then his buddies join in: ‘We need to murder any person who’s in there. Yeah, any person who’s in Gaza is a terrorist,’ and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.
…
Zamir: “I don’t understand. Why did he shoot her?”
Aviv: “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn’t see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her.”
…
“There was a huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out. The Education Corps published a pamphlet for commanders – something about the history of Israel’s fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present. The rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles, and … their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.
…

Posted by: b | Mar 20 2009 8:31 utc | 17

mo, it’s about as surprising or noteworthy to learn that in the course of Israel’s latest despicable mass murder spree murder occurred as it would be to learn that in the course of an orgy fucking occurred.

Posted by: ran | Mar 20 2009 11:10 utc | 18

it isn’t too easy to shock me these days, but i find this shocking
haaretz
Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques – IDF fashion 2009

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques – these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription “Better use Durex,” next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, “1 shot, 2 kills.” A “graduation” shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, “No matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it.”

Posted by: annie | Mar 21 2009 16:30 utc | 19

don’t forget annie, they’re “the most moral army in the world!”

Posted by: ran | Mar 21 2009 17:31 utc | 20

yuk!

Posted by: annie | Mar 21 2009 18:04 utc | 21

Really revolting, way too many different examples to be an isolated anomaly. Amazing Haaretz had the guts to run this, as it’ll never make any press here in the U.S. because this is like lampshade territory, in terms of branding.

Posted by: anna missed | Mar 21 2009 19:45 utc | 22

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