Opinions of Peter Belmont
Speaking Truth to Power
| One Israeli in 7 lives in occupied territories |
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by Peter A. Belmont / 2012-01-15
We read in the excellent blog of Richard Silverstein Yisrael HaYom published today one of the more stark and telling statistics about the ‘success’ of the Occupation: in 2011, 722,000 Israelis lived beyond the Green Line, including in settlements and East Jerusalem. This was a 5% increase over 2010. That means that 1 in every seven Israelis lives outside of 1967 borders and explains why the country is rapidly becoming a unitary state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. Bibiton and the settlers themselves are overjoyed with this development because it means they can continue pursuing their Apartheid Jews-only State. talking about this as a possibility or eventuality, but as a reality. Israel must be given a stark choice. Either it’s one state from river to sea in the old Jabotinskyean anthem or the Occupation must end now. This is amazing! The West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza—the occupied Palestinian territories—make up about 22%, or 1/5 of Mandatory Palestine, so that Israel (pre-1967 territory) is 78%. Now some of these Israelis who live outside the “green-line” (as Israelis describe the border of its pre-1967 territory [1] live in the Golan Heights, occupied Syrian territory. But most, by far, live in the OPTs. Well, 1/7 is not the same as 1/5, but it’s getting pretty close. These new figures mean that, very nearly, Israelis live AS DENSELY in the OPTs as they live behind the “green-line”. If the international community ever gets itself together to the point of demanding that Israel remove the settlers from all occupied territories—as they should, as the only guarantors of international law—they will be asking a great deal and Israel will cry very large crocodile tears. Still, it is the right thing to do, and Israel (and Israelis) have no-one to blame but themselves, since the settlement project was known to be illegal as early as 1967 and they acted in knowing violation of international law. The UNSC politely asked Israel to remove all settlers and dismantle all settlements in 1980. Israel was pleased to ignore this toothless request. But they knew. And they knew that the reason for the toothlessness of the request was the USA, ready as always to veto any UNSC resolution really hard on Israel. The USA may not always be available as the protector that Israel has known and loved. Oh, yes, AIPAC will always be here to bend the Congress and President to its will, and they will always want to be bent (elections are, after all, expensive!), but the USA’s debt is spiraling out of sight and China and others are beginning to show a tendency to resist supporting spendthrift USA for ever. And when the USA is no longer an economic superpower [2] (or sees the writing on the wall in time to stave off disaster), it may at long last take the point that Israel’s refusal to make a just peace with the Palestinians is the cause of a great deal of dangerous turmoil in the Middle East that cannot and should not all be dealt with by the use of the USA’s ever-more-expensive fancy-dancy only-superpower military toys and should, rather, be dealt with by demanding (with all necessary teeth) that Israel remove the settlers, remove the wall, remove/dismantle any settlements the Palestinians don’t themselves want to use, and lift the siege of Gaza—all as preparations for making the “just and lasting peace” that UNSC 242 (1967) called for. ----------- [1] NB: Israel has never declared or described its boundaries. I suppose its territorial acquisitiveness mandates this non-declaration. ----------- [2] A comment at the foregoing shows how it might happen: “Piano Racer January 9, 2012 at 6:32 pm # When this game ends, it all ends for the US. Any time they do something that doesn’t make sense on its face, like the NDAA or SOPA or PIPA or even the executive’s unilateral invasion of Libya and the subsequent sodomization / murder of their admittedly despotic but for decades US-supported ruler who was in the process of creating a hard currency union to trade oil in, its because that was what they thought they had to do to keep the music playing. The reams of documentation of the crimes of the bankers and the governments, much of it diligently put forward by our wonderful Golem XIV, do you think all of that was/is solely motivated by greed? Certainly some, but from my view much can be explained as the desperate, panicked, terrified moves of a cornered regime. Think of it this way: the US dollar isn’t really a fiat currency, it is? Its backed by oil. 100 of our cotton/linen doodads that we can create out of thin air will get you a barrel of oil, and in the past its been much cheaper than even that. The energy contained in a barrel of oil is something like the equivalent of… well, its a lot by historical standards. Chris Martenson makes a good analogy here: http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-17a-peak-oil “And how much ‘work’ is embodied in a gallon of gasoline, our most favorite substance of them all? Well, if you put a single gallon in a car, drove it until it ran out, and then turned around and pushed the car home, you’d find out. It turns out that a gallon of gas has the equivalent energy of 500 hours of hard human labor, or 12-1/2 forty-hour work weeks. So how much is a gallon of gas worth? $4? $10? If you wanted to pay this poor man $15 an hour to push your car home, then we might value a gallon of gas at $7,500.” Now multiply that by 42. So the group who has the power to print the cotton/linen rectangles that are the only objects on the planet that can (until recently) be traded for this magical substance… well, they’d probably have a lot of power, wouldn’t they? You might say they had more power than those that were actually pulling the magic goo out of the ground, since they have to expend zero effort to acquire it. Its like this: The banks/fed print the dollars, the people borrow / work hard / steal to earn the dollars, the government taxes the people and the businesses for the dollars, the government uses the dollars to buy the oil and raise the army to threaten those who produce the oil into accepting only their dollars for it. The US government also trades the dollars to other countries for all their neato-toys and whizgadgets because the other countries want the dollars so they can buy oil too. Neat trick, eh? But it looks like the game is finally coming to an end… Also, QE is just the process of the government going directly to the banks for the dollars instead of making the people earn them first. Very thoughtful of them! Only problem is that that can result in more dollars running around the system, which tends to drive the price of the magic goo up due to laws of supply and demand. Takes time though… The obvious and ongoing manipulation in the precious metals paper markets (see http://gata.org) are one of MANY extremely compelling reasons to hold in your personal possession precious metals. The price discovery mechanism is very obviously broken, and if/when the currency panic commences, does anyone really believe that the value of physical metals, rather than a tenuous claim to same, will not greatly increase in value? Camels and eyes of needles come to mind. Buy and hold physical, and wait. You’re going to need a time horizon of more than a couple of months, but in the medium/long term you will be well rewarded when bits and bytes and cotton and linen are re-evaluated as concepts of any value whatever. http://www.gainesvillecoins.com http://www.apmex.com Taking the first step outside the “mainstream” can be frightening, but holding those wonderful, rare, beautiful and historically significant metals in your hands will make you a believer in short order. You can gamble with paper and electrons if you wish, but in my view tangible items of real value with no counter-party risk are an EXTREMELY important component to any investment strategy, especially given recent global economic events and present circumstances. ” |
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