[quote=“jdsmith”][quote=“spook”][quote=“jdsmith”]That’s interesting, if I put myself in a Lebanese’s position, I’d want the dickhead miltia assholes to stop kidnapping the soldiers of out much stronger and prone to violence neighbor.I would also encourage all my family and friends to vote said asshole militia politicians out of office.
This group, and Hamas as well, are ruining their countries from within.[/quote]
Like I suggested, don’t take my word for it. Ask the Lebanese. Ask the Palestinians. Ask the Iraqi people. That’s the starting point and as far as I know that one simple first step to resolving the fundamental conflicts in the Middle East has never been taken.[/quote]
What’s the starting point?[/quote]
These guys have an idea:
[quote][url=http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/24/1439247]Yonatan Shapira-Former Captain in the Israeli Air Force Reserves. In 2003 Yonatan initiated the group of Israeli Air Force pilots who refused to fly attack missions on Palestinian territories. He is the co-founder of Combatants for Peace.
Bassam Aramim-Former member of Fatah, who served a 7 year prison sentence after being arrested in Hebron when he was 17 years old. He is currently a member of Combatants for Peace[/url].
YONATAN SHAPIRA: You know, it’s a long, long process. And during this process, you suffer. You find out things that you do not want to believe. But if I have to point to a few events that really helped me to wake up and to connect all those threads to one understanding that I must say no publicly, not just going out and not participating in something, but also standing and shouting, “We will not be part of it anymore!” I can refer to two events that happened back in 2002. It was in the middle of the Second Intifada, Al-Aqsa.
The first event I was participating in, I flew a Black Hawk helicopter, and I was called. I was the first helicopter to come to a place where a terror attack took place and many Jewish kids, many Israelis were injured severely, and I flew them with a Black Hawk to a hospital in the center of Israel next to Tel Aviv. And all the helicopter was full of blood, and the paramedics and doctors tried to work on the patients. And while I was landing in the hospital, I saw underneath a wedding and people were celebrating with the chupa, and the groom –
AMY GOODMAN: This was an Israeli wedding?
YONATAN SHAPIRA: It was an Israeli wedding, and I was completely shocked: how can people be so much disconnected to reality?
AMY GOODMAN: And the kids, how had they been hurt?
YONATAN SHAPIRA: They had been hurt severely by a Palestinian fighter who got in their house and shot all the family. And maybe I will mention something that it’s important. I am very much involved in the giving of support to terror victims in the Israeli side. I was volunteering in an organization named SELAH, which is the Israeli Crisis and Management Center. I saw a lot of suffering of my people.
And what happened a few weeks later after this event when I brought these children to hospital is that the commander of the Air Force and the government decided to assassinate the leader of the Hamas in Gaza Strip, Salah Shahade. And they ordered a F-16 with a one-ton bomb, that shot – that dropped this bomb on the house of the Hamas leader in Gaza Strip, killing with him 14 innocent civilians, 14 innocent people, including nine babies. And although I didn’t drop this bomb and I didn’t shoot in my life anyone, but I felt that this, me being part of this system that is causing this harm and this suffering and this killing to innocent people, it’s just the same like being a terrorist in another organization. And those kids who were killed by my fellow pilots and these kids that were killed by this Palestinian fighter are just the same.
And it took me a while to understand that not just these guys down in the wedding were disconnected to reality, but also in the cockpit here inside me was a lot of ignorance, a lot of things that I didn’t know. And then you start to figure out and to learn and to find out all this half-side history lesson that you didn’t get. And I realized that in order to change and not just to find a solution for myself, for my soul, for my being able to live with myself, I have to do something publicly. And I went from one pilot to another, used my connection to the Israeli Air Force military by, you know, people knew my father and I lived in a neighborhood with a lot of pilots, and I found more than a hundred pilots that agreed to cooperate by being silent about that. Just a few of them agreed to sign the petition that I wrote.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “being silent”?
YONATAN SHAPIRA: It took us about three to four months to recruit all these co-signers on this letter. When you want to do something that will be strong enough, that will shake the Israeli public opinion and the government and the military, you want to find not just one or two pilots who are willing to refuse. So we found brigadier generals, colonels, Air Force squadron commanders, Apache pilots, F-16, F-15, Cobra, all kind of squadrons from the Israeli Air Force, and all these guys agreed to keep silent while some of us are willing also to put their names on this petition and to refuse publicly.
And as a result of this petition, there was a big uproar in Israel, and all the signers were called to an interview with the commander of the Air Force, General Halutz, who is now the commander of the Army who is actually leading these criminal attacks on Lebanon. And in this interview with him, he told me that he’s going to discharge me from being a pilot in the Air Force, and I told him that actually I’m willing to be charged by him. Don’t just discharge me, but charge us all in charge of refusing to legal orders, because we are willing to sit in jail if they can show in court that these orders of killing suspects and, by that, killing innocent civilians, is legal. And, of course, they preferred just to let us go, and no one of us was in prison.
And since then, many of us became very active in the anti-occupation movement and in the anti-apartheid movement in Israel. And that’s why I’m here today talking to the American people, talking to the Jewish community, trying to convince them that it’s us who have to lead these demonstrations around the world. It’s us Jewish people and Israelis and former fighters, former combatants that took part in these wars, to lead these demonstrations who call for international pressure, who call for sanctions against the Israeli government who is doing these cruel things and brutal things in Lebanon. It will harm us Israelis, it will harm us Jewish people, if you will not wake up now, because it will not continue forever, and someone has to put an end to this.
. . . . .
YONATAN SHAPIRA: We decided that it’s not enough just to say no. We have to find out what do we say yes to, and actually my brother, who is also a refusenik, he was in the commando unit. He initiated this group with us and with several other Israeli refusers and Palestinian former fighters. We were all part of the violent struggle of our people, Israelis, as well Palestinians. And we decided a year and a half ago that we have to meet together and find a nonviolent way to struggle against occupation and against the circle of mutual violence, and we found out that these guys have a lot in common with us. We were meeting for about a year in secret meetings discussing our political views and our own process of transformation. And now after our launching event in last April, we decided that we are ready to go all over the world, in Israel, in Palestine, but all over the world to bring our message to the people.
. . . .
YONATAN SHAPIRA: If I can mention last thing, if we still have one minute, there is the issue of normalization, and many Palestinians are afraid that when you create a dialogue group, you also have some kind of accepting the occupation, accepting your oppressor, but this group is different. Once you are creating a coexistent group, a group of people who are reconciling with each other, but also are extremely connected to the political call and to the political action, I think it’s right and it has a right to exist now. We are not just solving our own problems and curing our own wounds. We also call for massive pressure against the Israeli government that continues this occupation, and this must be mentioned. [/quote]
