West Bank land belongs to Jews, says Israeli army judge

[Swede]

This guy should be removed from any sort of court. It helps no one.


Major Adrian Agassi did not make the connection between the Bible, the land and the Jews when, fresh out of university, he left England for Israel in search of his roots. He was not even a practising Jew.

But over the past quarter of a century, the Israeli army lawyer and then military judge at the forefront of arguably the most significant battle in the occupied West Bank – the confiscation of Palestinian land for the construction of Jewish settlements – has come to see himself as in service of a higher duty


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/26/west-bank-jews-army-judge

[damntexdem]

1. Manifest destiny.

How long can the world put up with Israeli expansionism?

[IndianaGreen]

7. Israel's version of Gott Mit Uns

The "God With Us" that was engraved in the belt buckles of the Kaiser's soldiers.

[fascisthunter]

2. all in his fucked up head

[ChairmanAgnostic]

3. lebensraum.

One century ago, that term was coined. It was later adopted by some beer hall meeting guy.

[Altoid_Cyclist]

4. Is this guy delusional or just corrupt bordering on evil?

I think that Maj. Agassi should read the following article in the hope that some of it will register with him.

Delusions are irrational beliefs, held with a high level of conviction, that are highly resistant to change even when the delusional person is exposed to forms of proof that contradict the belief. Non-bizarre delusions are considered to be plausible; that is, there is a possibility that what the person believes to be true could actually occur a small proportion of the time.

The grandiose subtype of delusional disorder involves the conviction of one's importance and uniqueness, and takes a variety of forms: believing that one has a distinguished role, has some remarkable connections with important persons, or enjoys some extraordinary powers or abilities.

Read more: http://www.minddisorders.com/Br-Del/Delusional-disorder.html#ixzz0V3WQmIYm


Peace T-shirt in English, Arabic & Hebrew

[IndianaGreen]

8. Neither! He is just a run of the mill Zionist.

Racism and exceptionalism do that to people.

[LeftishBrit]

11. No. Most Zionists are not theocrats.

The members of Peace Now and Meretz are Zionist but not right-wing. Netanyahu and Lieberman are Zionist and right wing but not theocratic. This judge represents a minority faction within Zionism.

[IndianaGreen]

18. but they all are imperialists

religion is just a pretext for imperialism, from biblical times to modern times.

[LeftishBrit]

24. No, they all are nationalists. Not the same thing.

[Scurrilous]

5. Maybe the water too.

Israel rations Palestinians to trickle of water: Amnesty

<snip>

"Amnesty International on Tuesday accused Israel of denying Palestinians adequate access to water while allowing Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank almost unlimited supplies.

Israel, the human rights group said, restricts availability of water in the Palestinian territories "by maintaining total control over the shared resources and pursuing discriminatory policies."

"Israel allows the Palestinians access to only a fraction of the shared water resources, which lie mostly in the occupied West Bank while the unlawful Israeli settlements there receive virtually unlimited supplies," Amnesty researcher Donatella Rovera said in a report.

Israel consumes four times more water than Palestinians, who use an average of 70 litres (16 gallons) a day per person, according to the report entitled: "Troubled waters - Palestinians denied fair access to water."

Amnesty said the "inequality" is even more pronounced in some areas of the West Bank where settlements use up to 20 times more water per capita than neighbouring Palestinian communities which survive on barely 20 litres (5.28 gallons) of water per capita a day.

"Swimming pools, well-watered lawns and large irrigated farms in Israeli settlements in the OPT (occupied Palestinian territory) stand in stark contrast next to Palestinian villages whose inhabitants struggle even to meet their domestic water needs."

more

[azurnoir]

6. The water situation has been documented for years

and continues to get worse, it should also be noted that water reserves in Israel proper are running short.

[ConsAreLiars]

9. AJE just ran a short report

focusing on one case in which a West Bank Palestinian had built a cistern to collect rainwater for irrigation purposes. The IDF destroyed the cistern "because he had no permit" from the occupation authorities. Building permits for Palestinians are nearly impossible to obtain, said the report. At the same time, the nearby "legal" settlement gets "permitted" and continues to expand, and the other land-grabbing actions (those settlements not designated as "legal" by the expansionist state) also continue to build and expand with no "permits" and only very rarely get busted up.

The thrust of the report was that the objective of this particular IDF action was to deprive the Palestinian owner the capacity to live off the harvests from his land and then make further "legal" expansion of the settlement into that area under some pretext easier.

Destroying the agricultural infrastructure of Palestinians living near settlements has long been a favorite past-time for those who have seized lands in the occupied areas, and prosecution has been rare and the few "punishments" laughable. How many of those gangsters had their homes bulldozed? Even the walling in of the occupied land has been designed with this purpose in mind.

The goal is clear, the methods obvious, and the evil being done is seeping into and corrupting the once admirable cultural identity and ethos of Judaism and the once widespread respect for the state of Israel.

(edit to change a word for a more accurate one)

[xc8mip]

12. Israeli goal is depopulation of Palestine

they are doing it with machine precision ,one could only admire human will to survive shown by terrorized Palestinians .

[oberliner]

14. Is this sarcasm?

The depopulation of Palestine?

Isn't it one of the most populated areas on earth?

[azurnoir]

13. Unusually low rainfall last winter left Kinneret, aquifers thirsty

Last winter Lake Kinneret only received about 56 percent of the water it receives in an average rainy season, the Water Authority said in a report released this week.

Precipitation was slightly greater than the winter before, but cumulatively speaking it is the fifth year in a row of less-than-average rainfall.

The Kinneret has dropped more than two meters in the past two years. In addition, the water has become increasingly more saline for the fifth year running, because less low-saline water (rainwater) is coming into the lake. Since the water is used for irrigation, this endangers crops sensitive to high salt concentrations.

The Water Authority said the southern part of the lake is below the dam keeping the water from flowing south into the Jordan River and on to the Dead Sea. Even if the dam were opened, no water would flow southward. The level of the Dead Sea has been dropping at the rate of about 90 centimeters a year.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1103953.html

[shira]

15. debunked - "Water Authority blasts Amnesty on report"

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1256557968809&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

yes folks, they really are out to defame and demonize Israel....it's not paranoia.

[azurnoir]

19. Your correct it is not paranoia

it is however the usual outright distortion we've come expect

this is hardly the first documentation of the water issue concerning the OPT

Israelis get four-fifths of scarce West Bank water, says World Bank

A deepening drought in the Middle East is aggravating a dispute over water resources after the World Bank found that Israel is taking four times as much water as the Palestinians from a vital shared aquifer.

The region faces a fifth consecutive year of drought this summer, but the World Bank report found huge disparities in water use between Israelis and Palestinians, although both share the mountain aquifer that runs the length of the occupied West Bank. Palestinians have access to only a fifth of the water supply, while Israel, which controls the area, takes the rest, the bank said.

Israelis use 240 cubic metres of water a person each year, against 75 cubic metres for West Bank Palestinians and 125 for Gazans, the bank said. Increasingly, West Bank Palestinians must rely on water bought from the Israeli national water company, Mekorot.

In some areas of the West Bank, Palestinians are surviving on as little as 10 to 15 litres a person each day, which is at or below humanitarian disaster response levels recommended to avoid epidemics. In Gaza, where Palestinians rely on an aquifer that has become increasingly saline and polluted, the situation is worse. Only 5%-10% of the available water is clean enough to drink.

The World Bank report, published last month, provoked sharp criticism from Israel, which disputed the figures and the scale of the problem on the Palestinian side. But others have welcomed the study and its findings.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/27/israel-palestinian-water-dispute

Israelis need it to stay secure from terror attacks, but the Palestinians see it as a barrier to making peace, and getting their fair share of water and other resources.

Alexandra Cousteau (who I spoke to while on her Expedition: Blue Planet in Israel) interviews an Arava Institute alum from the Palestinian Authority to get her take on how the security barrier affects water allocation in the West Bank. Cousteau manages to get a moderate and fair point of view from Muna Dujani, the young alum interviewed in Ramallah.

To read more about Cousteau’s amazing water education mission to Israel and the region, read It’s The Water That Binds Us.

To learn more about water allocations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, read Green Prophet’s take on the latest World Bank report

http://www.greenprophet.com/2009/04/24/8503/cousteau-water-israel-securit/

The UN’s sixteenth World Water Day, being commemorated today, is dedicated to cross-border waters. Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank have two trans-border water systems. One is the aboveground Jordan water basin, which Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon also share. Israel prevents Palestinians any access to this water reservoir. The other is the Mountain Aquifer underground water system. The Mountain Aquifer, which crosses the Israeli and Palestinian borders, is the primary, largest, and highest quality water source for Israelis and Palestinians, providing 600 million cubic meters of water a year. Israel uses eighty percent of the output for its needs and allocates the remainder to the Palestinians.

http://www.btselem.org/english/water/20090322_international_water_day.asp

and this is very revealing

The Israeli occupied West bank includes scarce water resources. The three principle underground aquifers of Palestine, marked in dark blue on the map, are found largely in the West Bank. These mountain aquifer areas have a water saturated substratum 200-600 meters deep. Light blue areas indicate land with less water, in which the thickness of the saturated subterranean stratum is no greater than 200 meters, with low potential water yield. Violet areas have little or no water.

The mountain aquifers are:

Yarkon-Tanninim Aquifer (1) This supplies Israel with about 340 million cubic meters of water annually, which are used by the Jerusalem-Tel-Aviv area. Palestinians use about 20 million cubic meters a year.

Nablus-Gilboa Aquifer (2) This supplies Israel with about 115 million cubic meters a year, largely for agricultural irrigation in the kibbutzim (communes) and moshavim (cooperative settlements) in Galilee.

The Eastern Aquifer (3) . This supplies about 40 million cubic meters annually to the Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley, and about 60 million cubic meters to the Palestinians.

Israeli planners consider that the Yarkon-Taninim Aquifer is vital to Israeli water needs, and therefore would like to retain control of settlement blocks over that area, adjacent to the so called "center" of Israel, the Gush Dan area. It should be noted that Israel's water supply always came from these Aquifers, both during mandate times and when the land was held by Jordan.

http://www.mideastweb.org/westbankwater.htm

[shira]

20. you should read more carefully that which utterly refutes AI's so called "findings"

The Water Authority slammed Amnesty International on Monday for failing to allow it to make any sort of presentation to Amnesty's researchers or react to the organization's findings on water allocation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority before the publication of its new critical report on Tuesday morning.

The new document examines an ongoing issue - the divvying up of water resources between the PA and Israel. The three main natural water resources are Lake Kinneret, the mountain aquifer and the coastal aquifer. The mountain aquifer runs almost entirely under the West Bank, and Amnesty slammed Israel for taking 80 percent of the water from the aquifer.

Water resources are one of the final-status negotiation issues between Israel and the PA, and it is safe to assume that no lasting changes will be made outside the context of those talks. Nevertheless, Amnesty has called on Israel to divide up the shared water resources now and end discrimination against Palestinians in favor of settlers.

The report also cites a vast difference in daily water use for the two parties. Amnesty cites 400 liters per day for Israelis, and just 70 for Palestinians. That figure puts the Palestinians below the World Health Organization recommendation of 100 liters per day.

However, the Water Authority hotly disputed those figures. According to the authority, while Israelis use 408 liters per day of fresh water from natural sources, Palestinians use 287 liters per day. While acknowledging the difference between these two amounts, the authority stressed that it was nowhere near as drastic as Amnesty had portrayed it.



The Foreign Ministry also refuted the report on Tuesday, stating that according to the existing water agreement, the Palestinians are allocated 23.6 million cubic meters of water per year, but "in actual effect, they have access to twice as much water."

In its statement, the Foreign Ministry said that Israel has "extensively surpassed the obligatory quantity" of water supplied to the Palestinians, while the Palestinians have "significantly violated their commitments under the water agreement" by neglecting the construction of sewage treatment plants despite "foreign funding earmarked for this purpose," as well as drilling over 250 unauthorized wells.

Israeli offers to supply the Palestinians with desalinated water were rejected due to political concerns, said the statement, adding that "Israel has reduced significantly its use of fresh natural water since 1967, consistently closing the gap between Israeli and Palestinian consumption."

The Amnesty International report cites examples of Israeli actions from the last nine years, such as confiscating water carriers, destroying rain collection cisterns and shooting at water tanks on rooftops - generally from Palestinian eyewitness accounts. It also cites instances of IDF closures, also during that period, that forced water carriers far out of their way to reach their clients, raising the price of water.

The report also brings instances in which it claims the IDF was restricting access to water or restricting entry of water carriers in order to push Palestinians off the land. Amnesty quotes an IDF officer as saying the area was a "closed military zone," and therefore a water carrier was denied entry.

"Over more than 40 years of occupation, restrictions imposed by Israel on the Palestinians' access to water have prevented the development of water infrastructure and facilities in the OPT , consequently denying hundreds of thousands of Palestinians the right to live a normal life, to have adequate food, housing or health, and to economic development," said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International's researcher on Israel and the OPT.

However, according to the Water Authority, while Israeli access to water before 1967 came out to about 500 cubic meters per person per year, nowadays it is just 149 cu.m. per year, a drop of 70%. In contrast, from a pre-1967 86 cu.m. per person per year, Palestinian consumption has risen to 105 cu.m.

The Water Authority also stressed that it routinely provided the PA with more water per year than the amounts stipulated in the Oslo Accords. It also said Palestinians routinely dug illegal wells and refused to purify and reuse their sewage for agriculture. Instead, they dumped their sewage into the streams in the West Bank, causing massive pollution.

The report contrasts the Palestinian situation with that of the settlers, showing pictures of sprinklers watering fields in the middle of the day and a swimming pool in Ma'aleh Adumim - a thriving city and one of the settlements commonly expected to become part of Israel in an eventual agreement - juxtaposed with pictures of empty or polluted cisterns.

The final recommendations of the report call on Israel to stop violating the Palestinians' human rights.

"Amnesty International calls on the Israeli authorities to urgently address the desperate need for water security in the OPT, brought about by their violations of Palestinians' human rights," the report reads. "The Israeli authorities should immediately:

Lift the restrictions currently in place which deny Palestinians in the OPT access to sufficient water to meet personal and domestic needs as well as to enjoy their rights to water, food, health, work and an adequate standard of living.

Put an end to policies and practices which discriminate against Palestinians and confer privileges to Israeli settlers with respect to access to water in the OPT.

Revoke all outstanding orders for demolitions and prohibit further demolitions of water facilities in Area C of the West Bank.

Lift the blockade on Gaza and allow immediate entry to Gaza of spare parts and construction and other material and equipment needed for the repair, reconstruction and maintenance of the water and sanitation infrastructure in Gaza."

1. Amnesty lied....just like Goldstone. They know they can get away with it and they won't even attempt to refute the Water Authority's claims that debunk their libel.

2. The other articles you cited are just as worthless as the AI report.

3. Amnesty thinks the PA is run by a bunch of retards who signed bad water deals with Israel because they didn't ask for enough water to meet Palestinian needs.

[azurnoir]

22. .the fact is Shira the rest of the world disagrees with you

your claim about the "bad water deals" is sort of like claiming that the Indians signed bad deals they did unfortunately for Israel the world has changed in the last 200 or so years

[shira]

26. facts are facts....some people prefer narratives and fiction over reality

[shira]

21. and here's more that was never addressed by AI or the World Bank months ago...

from MFA spokesman, April 2009...

The Israel-Palestinian water policy is based on an interim agreement between the two parties, particularly on Article 40 of Annex III to the agreement, which relates to the question of water and sewage. According to the agreement, 23.6 million cubic meters of water will be allocated to the Palestinians annually. In actual effect, they have access to twice as much water.

Israel has fulfilled all its obligations under the water agreement regarding the supply of additional quantities of water to the Palestinians, and has even extensively surpassed the obligatory quantity. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have significantly violated their commitments under the water agreement, specifically regarding important issues such as illegal drilling (they have drilled over 250 wells without the authorization of the joint water commission) and handling of sewage (The Palestinians are not constructing sewage treatment plants, despite their obligation to do so. Rather, they allow the sewage to flow unheeded into streams, polluting both the environment and groundwater).

The authors of the report met with MFA officials, and were briefed on all the factual details. They were also presented with the Israeli position paper on the subject, which contained verifiable facts that contradict all the objections presented in the bank's report.

Significantly, the authors chose to ignore the MFA position, and declined to take the facts presented to them into consideration in the published report. They rely totally on unsubstantiated information supplied by the Palestinian Authority, which raises a serious question mark over the credibility of the report and the intentions of its authors.

Despite that, it is important to note that Israel and the Palestinian Authority have several channels of communication and cooperation regarding water, including bilateral ad-hoc committees and coordinating committees between the water authorities of both parties. These meet at least once a month and solve water-related problems in accordance with understandings and cooperation.

If the MFA is lying, I'm certain the World Bank and AI would let us all know.

:eyes:

Again, it's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

[azurnoir]

23. So now the World Bank is out to get Israel too?

where oh where will it end they're all against us on noes LOL

really no one other than "true believers" in the Israel is always right cult believe what the Israeli Foreign Ministry (MFA) pump out

I am done it is not worth debating and anyone with ounce of knowledge on the subject knows the distortion MFA pumps out on any subject but this one takes the cake

claim whatever you want here I am not wasting any more time

[shira]

25. all they and AI have to do is refute the MFA....they won't, just like Goldstone won't refute critics

there is no penalty for those who attempt to smear and demonize Israel.

they know they can get away with it and folks like yourself are their cheerleaders.

============

look, if the MFA were really full of shit, the refutations would be plastered all over Haaretz and Israel's major news.

let's not pretend Israel's left would allow the MFA to get away with a lot of BS.

============

the fact is, Israelis are so used to the slander and libel, they really aren't that interested in having to dispute everything claimed against the country.

[LeftishBrit]

10. Argh. Religion should be kept out of legal and political decisions.

[imdjh]

16. You don't have to look to the Bible to know that. They won it. Now will they defend it?

That's the only question. A country owns land that it can defend. If it can't defend it, if it can't hold it, then it doesn't own it. All the paper and "right" and "wrong" don't mean shit when it comes to this aspect of human existence. That some country has held its border for centuries with little or no army, is irrelevant, it simply means no one challenged it.

If we do not patrol our Mexican border, if we do not police our society and enforce our immigration laws, labor laws, residency laws, and if the area of the US currently being colonized by Mexico become a defacto part of Mexico, then we will have forfeited it, unless we are willing to go to war for it.

[azurnoir]

17. so by your "standards" the US should own the world

you must support our actions in Iraq also mindsets such as yours were what lead to WW2 and could lead to WW3

[ConsAreLiars]

27. I think you may have told more about your ideology than was clever.

Some who share it here are far more discrete. "Might makes right" is the shorter version, and it defines you as a mindless tool and follower of those with who control more resources, including the power to commit mass murder.

How sick is that? Think about it.