Here is what Israeli Foreign Minister stated back in 1967 --

[truedelphi]

Here's what Abba Eban, then the Israeli Foreign Minister and later the recipient of the Israel Prize, said to the UN General Assembly on June 19, 1967:

The blockade is by definition an act of war, imposed and enforced through armed violence. Never in history have blockade and peace existed side by side. From May 24 onward, the question who started the war or who fired the first shot became momentously irrelevant. There is no difference in civil law between murdering a man by slow strangulation or killing him by a shot in the bead. From the moment at which the blockade was imposed, active hostilities had commenced and Israel owed Egypt nothing of her Charter rights. If a foreign power sought to close Odessa or Copenhagen or Marseilles or New York harbour by the use of force, what would happen? Would there be any discussion about who had fired the first shot? Would anyone ask whether aggression had begun?

So that's the funny part:

By Israel’s standards, Hamas has been entitled (since the start of the blockade in 2007) to invade Israel and then occupy it for forty years.

Maybe Hamas officials should start pointing this out. They can direct curious reporters to the only place I can find Eban's speech online, the website of the Israel Defense Forces.

All of the above from the people over at TinyRevolution.com

[enid602]

1. Never again . . .

A lot of Israeli maxims are being discarded these days.

[calilama]

3. Slightly different...Israel closed border because Hamas declared war on Israel...blowing up buses

and pizza parlors with suicide bombers..then lobbing missiles into civilian areas...Israel did nothing to its neighbors Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 except EXIST as a free democracy in a sea of despots..only an asshole would compare the two scenarios...

[enid602]

5. Control issues?

For 7 years? How many of those 'terror tunnels' are being used to smuggle in food and pampers? Why bomb Gaza's main power plant, when you know they can't pump water without it? To keep Pallywood's cellphones and PC's silent so the world won't know what's really going on there? Only an asshole supports this type of treatment.

[truedelphi]

11. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^n/t

[King_David]

13. Smuggle food and Pampers ?

From tunnels into Israel ?

From Egypt maybe .

The ones into Israel were for terror attacks.

Hamas could of used these tunnels as bomb shelters to protect the children during this campaign .
But that is not what they want.

[freshwest]

18. They should go into the tunnels until all come to an agreement.

[DeSwiss]

8. No buts......

[shaayecanaan]

19. Bullshit

The 1967 war started largely over water, mainly Israel's objections to Arab states diverting water on their own territory to themselves:-

In 1951, Jordan announced its plan to divert part of the Yarmouk River via the East Ghor Canal to irrigate the East Ghor area of the Jordan Valley. In response, Israel began the construction of its National Water Carrier (NWC) in 1953. In 1964, the NWC opened and began diverting water from the Jordan River Valley. This diversion led to the Arab Summit of 1964, where a plan was devised to begin diverting the headwater of the Jordan River to the Syrian Arab Republic and Jordan. From 1965 to 1967 Israel attacked these construction projects in the Syrian Arab Republic and along with other factors this conflict escalated into the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel completely destroyed the Syrian diversion project and took control of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. This gave Israel control of the Jordan River’s headwater and of significant groundwater resources. The most recent direct water-related conflict occurred in 1969 when Israel attacked Jordan’s East Ghor Canal due to suspicions that Jordan was diverting excess amounts of water (Green Cross Italy, 2006). Later on, Israel and Jordan acquiesced to the apportionment contained in the non-ratified 1955 Johnston Plan for sharing the Jordan River Basin’s water (Milich and Varady, 1998). In 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon, giving Israel temporary control of the Wazzani spring/stream feeding the Jordan River (Attili et al., after 2003).

http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/basins/jordan/index.stm

[Spitfire of ATJ]

2. Then there's this famous quote...

[calilama]

4. There's something we can agree on

Israel should lose the goofball greater Israel crowd...just a Hebrew Taliban....filled with religious bigotry and hatred

[Spitfire of ATJ]

6. Not to mention the way America goes to religious leaders in the Middle East....

Imagine if America were taken over and the invaders decided to put Pat Robertson in charge.

[NealK]

7. K&R

[DeSwiss]

9. Everything is turned around and inside out these days......

...but it won't last.

- ''Chaos is needed for the veils to fall down.....''

K&R

[kelliekat44]

10. kick!

[King_David]

12. There was no blockade after every last Jew evacuated Gaza

Then the rockets started .

[oberliner]

14. Here's some of the response from the Arab League to those UNGA remarks

The leader of my country has time and again made it explicit, in various capitals of Western Europe, that the Arab world cannot accommodate Zionism in our midst. It is not a question of thousands of official statements, I should like to tell Mr. Eban. If our leaders did not reflect the mood of the Arab people, they would not remain leaders. This is something which should be noted by all countries, especially the Western countries which were instrumental in creating Israel. They have forgotten that this artificial State has destroyed the indigenous people of Palestine. Forget that they are Arabs: they were the natives of Palestine.

We consider the leaders of Israel as Europeans, as representing a new form of colonialism. We cannot accommodate a European political incursion in our midst. Any leader who does not reflect the mood and the ethos and the thinking of the Arab world will be liquidated by none other than the Arab people. Let this sink into the minds of those who created Israel.

[truedelphi]

15. And pray tell, just why were those remarks even made?

Did it have anything to do with the fact that outside interests stripped the Palestinians of their homes, their land, their form of governance? And lives were lost as well.

Before 1948, maps for the area had the word "Palestine" engraved over that land mass. After that date, the word was now "Israel" and this new government was a theocracy, in which Jewish people had an edge up over their neighbors.

The new arrivals, who now ruled the land, were indeed Europeans. And unfortunately the mindset they used with which to secure their future was the mindset they had learned under the Third Reich, which is a Kill or be Killed, and displace your enemies into camps, (from which they should not be allowed to freely leave), style of philosophy.

This fine state of affairs came from the UN making this Israeli taking a legal occupation. But Israelis never even mention the word "Occupation." The whole society firmly trumpets the notion that a Big Black Book gives them and them alone the land. And that Book also secures for them the right to hold that land with the same vengeful force that is detailed time and time again in the Old Testament. Gd gave the land of Israel to them; the UN acknowledges this; and what happened in 1948 is a legal taking.

The problem with that is that "legal" does not at all mean the same thing as "moral." The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were immorally removed from their homes, and their land, the Palestinians who were killed, wounded and forced to go abroad, with many settling in Jordan and Syria, all this was immoral, surely just as immoral as the "legal" decrees of the Nazi government in power some few years before the Israeli government, which had ruled form 1933 to 1945, and which had killed, wounded and displaced millions of People who were Jewish as well as millions who were East Europeans and Russians.

No one can have it both ways. If Germany's takings, done under law, were immoral, than so are the takings of 1948.

[King_David]

16. The whole post you wrote is so inaccurate that it doesn't even need rebutall

Where did you read this Complete nonsense.

Share your sources and links .

[truedelphi]

17. I suppose at this point in the game, I prefer to be told I am nonsensical, than

To hear the term "anti-semite," but whatever.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

22. Well, to be perectly honest the whole "You're an anti-Semite" excuse

has been used so often that it has lost its meaning.

[truedelphi]

23. I know - a person would think that people would realize that -

But everyday the expression is used here (at least a half dozen times that I notice).

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

24. Well, what else have the hasbaristas left

in their arsenal of poo?

They can't say that Israel isn't a colonizer with a straight face. Nobody really belives that Israel is taking land ad a barganing chip. They're land theives.

They can't say that Israel is benevolent after the wholesale slaughter of children in Gaza. The IDF is bloodthirsty.

They can't say that they're for peace after Netanyahu started this shit by attacking Hamas.

So they have little left except to exude their stale "Anti-Semite" song and dance: trailing David Duke and Hitler as tired dance partners.

The kings and queens of hasbara are morally bankrupt and ethically challenged.

[WatermelonRat]

20. You're acting like they weren't already effectively in a state of war when the blockade was started

And Egypt's blockade had absolutely nothing to do with their justification for occupying the West Bank and Gaza, though I suspect you already knew that. They were separate issues.

[truedelphi]

21. Here's the thing,

And since Mike Malloy explains it far more eloquently than I ever could, I will leave it to him:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017208864