Israeli army veterans show dark side of occupation

Disenchanted Israeli army veterans have turned into guides to one of the bleakest places on the West Bank, the Israeli-held part of Hebron, to highlight what they say is the ugly face of occupation most Israelis never see. Over the past 20 months, former soldiers have led some 2,500 people, in small groups of around a dozen, mostly Israelis, on grim show-and-tell excursions meant to explain the brutalising effect of daily routine in an occupied city. Stops on the tours include the positions from where former squad commander Yehuda Shaul says he fired his grenade machinegun, night after night, into a densely populated neighbourhood from where Palestinians, night after night, fired on Jewish settlements. "A grenade machine gun is an awesome weapon, but it is inaccurate," he says. "The grenades kill everything within a radius of eight metres, injure anyone within a radius of 16. So, at first you worry about hitting innocent civilians. After a while, you shrug off the worries and get used to it. In the end, you look forward to blasting away."

[more]

  thanks to Antiwar.com

Twilight Zone / After her!
By Gideon Levy

When it was all over, the soldiers gave her a cookie and some halva. And just to be on the safe side, they added a threat: "Don't you dare tell your parents; otherwise we'll kill you," they told her before letting her go, knowing they had done a terrible thing. But little Jihan did tell, and so did her parents: The IDF is using children as human shields.

[more]

  thanks to Antiwar.com

The History of Israel Reconsidered:
A Talk by Ilan Pappe

This is more or less the version we grew up with. Another mythology was that a major invasion took place in '48, a very strong Arab contingent went into Palestine and a very small Jewish army fought against it. It was a kind of David and Goliath mythology, the Jews being the David, the Arab armies being the Goliath, and again it must be a miracle if David wins against the Goliath. So this is the picture. What we found challenged most of this mythology. First of all, we found out that the Zionist leadership, the Israeli leadership, regardless of the peace plans of the United Nations, contemplated long before 1948 the dispossession of the Palestinians, the expulsion of the Palestinians. So it was not that as a result of the war that the Palestinians lost their homes. It was as a result of a Jewish, Zionist, Israeli, call it what you want, plan that Palestine was ethnically cleansed in 1948 of its original indigenous population.

[more]

Welcome to the Official Website of Ilan Pappé

Israel's Last Chance

Normalizing Injustice
Jaffa's Ugly Truth