Alwan for the Arts Benefit Concert for Lebanon & Palestine tamasha posted on July 25, 2006, 10:31 pm EDT A concert of Lebanese resistance music featuring songs by Fairouz & Marcel Khalifeh. Donations: $20 / $30 / $40. All proceeds will go to humanitarian relief organizations.

When: Sat, July 29, 2006, 8:00pm Where: Alwan For the Arts, 16 Beaver St, 4th Floor, New York

A good cause, but isn’t it non-desi? It’s been there for sometime now. More at home on this thread probably!

MeA CuLpA: I was wrong about Israel currently holding over a thousand Hizbullah members in Israeli jails. Israel has in fact released (or done prisoner swap) for most of the Hizbullah members. I think less than 20 Hizbullah members are left in Israeli jails. Israel however is still holding around 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails (including women and children in thousands) Apologies!

Israel use torture ? yes it has. Mossad has tortured many terrorist elements. How do you think they come up with such excellent intelligence. When RAW captured a foreign militant a couple of years back and was interrogating him, he held his own until he was informed that he was being handed over to Mossad at their request. Apparently he was so scared that he confessed. I cannot back this account with any reference because it came from a personal source , but Mossad has used torture before, it is reserved for those who they know have information about incoming attacks on civilians.

The PLO-run Palestinian Authority had also been accused of torture by the same groups, such as HRW. The PA was long been regarded by Palestinians as corrupt and problematic, but also supported in the face of the larger issue of the Israeli state.

I cannot find any reports of Hamas or Hezbollah torturing prisoners, certainly not on a systemic basis. In fact, the former’s members were often tortured by the PA! If anyone can find otherwise, please do put the information up.

I’m curious how these warring entities treat each other’s prisoners of war? Somehow I feel, even though Israel and some of its neighbors have been at each others throats for quite some time, their conflicts are likened almost to cousins fighting. That is, they fight sometimes, most of the time, and the rest of the time they’re forced to “try and make it work” against their will. But they have so much in common, in terms of similar language, similar religion (Abrahamic traditions), similiar food, etc.. Can we expect Abu Ghraib like behavior if Israel were to capture Lebanese soldiers as POWs, or vice versa?

Will we see a picture of an IDF soldier pointing to a naked Hezbollah’s private parts?

More than often on internet, the context is removed or sometimes quotes are misqouted (dates removed in your example), I have noticed.

Here’s an interesting discussion – I should certainly hope people find it to be a “balanced” perspective – on what motivated Nasser’s move to buildup troops along the border. Essentially it claims that, while Israel was clearly perceived as an affront to the Arab world (in the context of pan-Arabism, particularly salient), this move was essentially “saber-rattling”, possibly to provoke a pre-emptive strike from Israel. The fundamental motivation seems political and ideological.

If you view this from a colonial/postcolonial perspective, this ideology and politics makes a lot of sense. This is the fundamental disagreement, however. If you believe that European Jews had a rightful claim to Palestine – or the opposite, as I do, that Zionism was essentially an ideology of manifest destiny and colonization – then this is eventually the grounds on which all argument and debate fails.

The elements that have occurred afterwards – Balfour, communal violence, “terrorism” (a term which evokes far too much reactionary emotion, given that attacks on civilians has been a tragic element of warfare for eons), Palestinian and Israeli attacks on military (regular or irregular or “informal”) and non-military/civilian targets, the Six-Day and Yom Kippur/Ramadan Wars, etc – are all colored in one light or another. The question of who is the hunter and who is the lion is, I think, the most important one here.

Israel has said their operations would end if the kidnapped soldiers are returned.

I was curious about the quotes too, b/c mainstream historians have longed maintained it was a pre-emptive strike against clear Egyptian aggression. If you google it, all one will find are strident left-wing, islamist, or anti-Semitic sites. The only explanation I could find was on the strident pro-Israeli site, LGF. Sorry I couldnÂ’t find a credible source but for what it’s worth, this guy has some explanation:

The actual quote:

“I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai on 14 May [1967] would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.”

What is the difference? The date of course. Perhaps on May 14th, Nasser did not want war. HOWEVER many things happened between May 14 and June 5. Egypt ordered the UN peacekeepers to leave, Egypt blockaded Israel’s Red Sea Port. Egypt moved another 5 divisions to the Israeli Border, 100,000 troops in all. Egyptian dictator Nasser threatened Israel with genocide.

Here is the original in FRENCH:

Q. Penser-vous que Nasser a fait semblait de croire a vos menaces parce qu’il cherchait a provoquer la guerre?

A. Je ne pense pas que Nasser voulait la guerre. Les deux divisions qu’il envoya dans le Sinai, le 14 mai, n’aurient pas suffi pour declencher une offensive contre Israel. Il le savait, et nous le savions.

I actually went to the library, and looked it up on microfiche.

This is how I found this little tidbit, Rabin also said in the same interview:

A en juger par les sept divisions qu’il envoya dans le Sinai, apres le fermiture d’Akaba, il savait pourtant que nous considererions son geste comme un casus belli.

Translated as:

judging by the seven divisions which he sent to Sinai after the closure of Aqaba, he knew that we would consider his gesture to be a casus belli.

SO, in the exact same interview that he say shows Rabin didn’t believe that the Arabs started the 1967 war, the same interview that helped convince him that the Israelis started the 1967 war, Rabin clearly states that Egypt did start the 1967 war.

By leaving out the date, and quoting out of context, he purposly is decieving (or decieved, you pick).