there 'aint no Hamas in the West Bank

"medieval" is an obvious lie, only used by chris patten, irish foreign minister micheal martin and various journalists such as john pilger

yankeeuxb, you should not be repeating a lie like this …

yankeeuxb: The war crime apologist's excuse for the continued medieval siege on Gaza and the collective punishment of 1.5 million people …

(a lot of sites claim that john ging of unrwa has also used "medieval", but i can find no confirmation of this, and i suspect it is a mistake for fellow irishman michael martin: can anyone else find it? )

a medieval siege did not allow any food medicine or other supplies in, nor did it allow anyone out for free medical treatment (and it certainly did not supply free electricity! )

calling the israeli-eqyptian blockade of gaza "medieval" is simply lying

as for "war crimes", a blockade (provided it satisfies humanitarian law, which this blockade does) is not a war crime, nor is any "collective punishment" unless it amounts to "collective penalties", see the fourth geneva convention …

Art. 33. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

(oh, and it ain't 'aint )

happy, re 'medieval siege' see my blog post http://www.raymondcook.net/blog/index.php/2010/03/19/ging-ging-gone-nati... of the 19th March where I quote the BBC News website reporting that Ging said:

We have to have action. A thousand days and a thousand nights of a medieval siege is far too much. It’s a shame – it’s a disgrace

Yankee says 'there ain't no Hamas in the West Bank'. although this is not quite true, it is true to say that they do not hold power in the West Bank. But what is true is 'there ain't no Israelis in Gaza'.

As I've never been a supporter of West Bank Settlements I'm not going to deny the undeniable.

Jerusalem, however is another matter.
'Occupied' East Jerusalem' we hear so often. But which country's territory is being occupied? Why was it not called 'occupied Jerusalem' between 1948 and 1967 when it was occupied by Jordan? Jordan who expelled all Jews and Islamised East Jerusalem demolishing all the synagogues and limiting Christian access to holy places.

raycook, thankyou for that source

curiously, it seems to be a one-sentence interview of john ging by the bbc (on 18/3/2010) … no other part of it seems to be on record, and we don't know where it was, or who interviewed him … nevertheless, it's probably authentic

interestingly, the beginning of the full phrase ging used, "A thousand days and a thousand nights", seems to have originated from a press conference on darfur by jan egeland, un undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs (and darfur emergency relief coordinator) in geneva on 18/11/2006 (see http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?page=imprimable&id_article=18791) …

Just imagine that this is now 1,000 days and 1,000 nights with defenseless civilians living in fear for their lives, for their future, for the life of their children, for the lives of their beloved.

(that's darfur) perhaps ging was thinking of the siege of sarajevo (April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996)? … see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sarajevo …

… encircled Sarajevo with a siege force of 18,000 stationed in the surrounding hills, from which they assaulted the city with weapons that included artillery, mortars, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, heavy machine-guns, multiple rocket launchers, rocket-launched aircraft bombs, and sniper rifles.
…
It is estimated that nearly 10,000 people were killed or went missing in the city, including over 1,500 children. An additional 56,000 people were wounded, including nearly 15,000 children. … population of 525,980.
…
The prosecution alleged in an opening statement that:

"The siege of Sarajevo, as it came to be popularly known, was an episode of such notoriety in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia that one must go back to World War II to find a parallel in European history. Not since then had a professional army conducted a campaign of unrelenting violence against the inhabitants of a European city so as to reduce them to a state of medieval deprivation in which they were in constant fear of death. In the period covered in this Indictment, there was nowhere safe for a Sarajevan, not at home, at school, in a hospital, from deliberate attack."

Now that's what i call a medieval siege!

Ray: Part of the problem is that what is and what is not "occupied" territory seems quite ill-defined to me. To plenty of people around the world Tel Aviv is "occupied", and not much will convince them otherwise. As for what the left and Palestinian sympathisers in the UK think, that seems to change depending on the current political circumstances. Who would have thought Jerusalem's status would be a subject of debate amongst Western politicians before Barack Obama made it one?

It seems to me that Israeli governments encourage this to a degree by failing to set clear boundaries, but a lot of that is due to pressure from the US - some of which has been based on bad advice in my view.

Israel should clearly state - privately - what it is prepared to concede. Jerusalem should be a red line and dividing the city again should not even be an option.

One encouraging bit of news is that the Arab league has just authorised Abbas to enter direct negotiations, so maybe we'll see some progress soon. Although I don't entirely trust the Arabs not to use negotiations as a stalling tactic just to halt settlement building.

As we saw from ibrows' post the other day about Bedouins in the Negev, the situation at the moment seems to be that Arabs can build illegally but Jews cannot, which isn't sustainable and isn't fair.

(By Arabs I meant non-Jewish Arabs, just to be clear)

mattpryor
Isnt't the slogan of ibrows and his "ilk" -
"From the river to the sea Palestine shall be free".
Where does that leave Israeli settlement legal or what the "lefties" believe to be illegal?

Well exactly Jon. Although I think a lot of these kids that chant that sort of thing don't really understand what they're saying (or repeating), or at least haven't thought it through properly.