51 thoughts on “Shimon Peres: Don’t Cry for Him, Palestine – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. Despite our vastly different attitudes, I completely agree with you on this point. (although I think most Israelis couldn’t have cared less if Arab/Palestinian leaders attended)
    I was actually surprised to see Abbas there, and was imagining how he must be cringing just being there having to listen to all of these Zionist speeches under the hot Jerusalem sun. Somebody must have twisted his arm to attend.

    I most certainly was neither surprised nor disappointed that Israeli Arab politicians attended (although I did see some local Arab representatives, perhaps Druse leaders).

    Nonetheless Peres did become somewhat of a transformational character in his old years, thus the wide admiration among world leaders. I suspect that if something happened to Netanyahu none of these people would come to his funeral.

      1. Peres was also a liar: in this documentary by the BBC, not only does he claim that the Arabs were proposed the majority of historical Palestine by the Partition Plan, he also claims that Zionists/Israelis had absolutely no responsability in the Palestinian exodus, on the contrary Ben Gourion wanted the Arabs to stay (from minute 33:55):
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCC3BEwdS0M
        And Peres was the one who ordered Mordechai Vanunu’s kidnapping in Rome, not to speak of his direct responsability in the Qana massacre in 1996.

        1. An article by Ilan Pappe from 2013, he’s translated a part of a Shimon Peres speech on the eve of “Independence Day”:
          “I remember how it all began. The whole state of Israel is a millimeter of the whole Middle East. A statistical error, barren and disappointing land, swamps in the north, desert in the south, two lakes, one dead and an overrated river. No natural resource apart from malaria. There was nothing here. And we now have the best agriculture in the world. This is a miracle: a land built by people”
          (Maariv, 14 April 2013).
          https://electronicintifada.net/content/when-israeli-denial-palestinian-existence-becomes-genocidal/12388
          Pure colonial mindset, strange he didn’t see the green of the Galilee, noticed by European travellers in the 19th century, not to speak about the description of Palestine by Ahad HaAm and other Zionists.

          1. “I remember how it all began. The whole state of Israel is a millimeter of the whole Middle East. A statistical error, barren and disappointing land, swamps in the north, desert in the south, two lakes, one dead and an overrated river. No natural resource apart from malaria. There was nothing here. And we now have the best agriculture in the world. This is a miracle: a land built by people”

            Of course many I along with so many Jewish children in America were taught this during the 1950’s and 1960’s, which was that there were just a bunch of nomads that lived in Palestine, and that it was the Israelis who “made the desert bloom.”

          2. @ Lotta: How do you think they made the deserts bloom? It was also the Zionists who drained the waters sources of the Galilee and Dead Sea so that they have been drained to within an inch of their existence & deprived indigenous Palestinians of their own source of drinking water. It was the Zionists who planted forests of non-native trees around Jerusalem which burned like a tinder trap at the first drought. It was the same Zionists who deliberately bombed Beirut’s oil storage facilities poisoning the Mediterranean for years to come with oil pollution. Is a tenet of Zionism to destroy the natural environment as it builds a nation?

          3. Israel Jacob Kligler, who initiated the efforts was a truly admirable person. Kligler’s political views, by the way, lay with the Brit Shalom “covenant of peace”, together with his close friends Judah Magnes and Henrietta Szold. He died in 1944, so did not have to see how Palestine, now almost malaria-free, was depopulated of its Arab inhabitants. Can we say the Jewish militia took over the work of the mosquito’s?

          4. @ Elizabeth

            Nearly seven thousand Jews died during the 1948 war.
            They weren’t killed by mosquitos. They were murdered by Arabs.

            Maybe your narrative requires minimizing Jewish death and suffering at the hands of Arabs.
            I prefer to deal in numerical facts.

          5. @ Lotta: Those 7,000 Israelis (not Jews, since they didn’t die as Jews, but as Israelis) died as a result of Ben Gurion’s reckless provocation declaring a state when he knew the Arabs would respond with an attack. Ralphe Bunche & Judah Magnes begged Ben Gurion, as reported in the NYT of the day, to negotiate rather than present a fait accompli to the Arabs. He preferred to “create facts” rather than negotiate, a habit cultivated by Israeli generals & politicians to this day.

          6. Walter Balin. You are wrong. What is today the northern coastal plain of Israel is part of the climatic region called the Mediterranean Zone. It is a fertile land that supported agricultural societies for over 4000 years. The increase in agricultural output after 1948 was due to European water pumping technology – – that was the reason the swamps were drained:. The Israelis dropped the water table. This is what led to the salination of the coastal plain water table. At first they had so much water that they tried to raise forests of Northern European pines in that area (nostalgia for their ancestral European homeland I suppose). The Carmel forest fire put an end to that fantasy. None of this was a miracle., simple mindless exploitation of their limited water resources.

          7. @ Lotta
            Of course it’s not historical facts, and of course it takes a colonial mindset to claim there was nothing in Palestine prior to the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews ! Why don’t you read some of the Western travellers who visited Palestine prior to the Zionists’ arrival and why don’t you read Ahad HaAm’s description of Palestine from his three month stay in 1891. You can find it on the net
            Concerning the fight against malaria in Palestine, we know the colonial propaganda about indigenous people without history. I encourage you to study the life and work of the Palestinian scientist Tawfiq Kanaan/Canaan (start with wiki), who was doing research in malaria in the beginning of the 20th century, and treatment of malaria had started among the indigenous population of Palestine prior to any collaboration with the Zionists. Yes !
            I encourage you to read a book by American-Israeli academic, Sandra Marlene Sufian (PhD in Medical history), in her book “Healing the land and the nation: malaria and the Zionist project in Palestine, 1920-1947” (partially on the net, googlebooks) she writes about Kanaan, the treatment of malaria in Palestine, and she debunks the usual Zionist propaganda.
            Your BS reminds of me of a Frenchman I heard trying to defend French colonisation of Algeria by saying; “We constructed airports there, didn’t we ?” Yeah, between 1830-1962, that’s when most airports were constructed around the world. What I’m trying to say here is: without the Zionist settlement Palestine would have gotten rid of malaria too !

          8. @ Toivo
            Walter Ballin is quoting Shimon Peres from my comment. As I read Walter, he doesn’t agree, but he was taught the same thing during his scool days.

          9. Israel allowed the use of DDT until the 1980’s. It killed the mosquitoes with massive DDT poisonings (like after WW2 was done all around the world), not with drying the swamps, which is a slow “solution”. DDT was the very popular way after WW2 to reduce malaria. It was not an Israeli innovation and if the “Israeli” invasion had not happened it is certain that the local real inhabitants would have used that same then used method to reduce malaria. Absurd to take credit of something that happened allover.

            The swamps were returned.
            http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/05/world/israel-restoring-drained-wetland-reversing-pioneers-feat.html

            Like normal “Israelis” say that the drying was not a mistake…

          10. I found a good book reveiw of the book by Sandra Sufian, it’s really very interesting, not only about the Arab contribution to the fight against malaria in Palestine (I note that Tawfiq Canaan was working and giving courses on the topic even prior to Kligier’s arrival in Palestine !) but particularly on the main topic of the book: the Zionist colonial view on Palestine as a savage place that had to be domesticated, and how the draining of the swamps was linked to the image of the New Jew.

            http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/gallagher251008.html

          11. @Deir Yassin

            Treating the effects of malaria, and eradicating malaria bearing mosquito larvae, are two completely different things. Yes/No.

            “there was nothing in Palestine prior to the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews ”

            I didn’t say that. You did.
            I am saying that malaria was eradicated by Zionists because doing so furthered the Zionist agenda.
            But for, the eradication of malaria, Zionism probably would have been an utter failure.

            Please tell me, with some specificity, what Zionist propaganda did Sandra Sufian debunk?
            Maybe your book review will tell you, because I doubt you actually read her book.

            I’ll be waiting.

          12. @ Lotta: She told you to read the book. She didn’t say ‘ask me questions so I can do the work for you.’ Now, go read the book and learn something you don’t know. I strongly doubt you will since you’d rather bask in your ignorance and thinly supported prejudices.

          13. @ “Lotta”
            I quote you: ” “there was nothing in Palestine prior to the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews”
            I didn’t say that. You did.”
            Nope ! Shimon Peres said that in the speech I quoted, I commented: “pure colonial mindset” and you answered “pure historical facts”, so yes, you agreed with Peres that there was nothing in Palestine prior to Zionists’ arrival, but maybe you don’t understand what you’re writing yourself.

            “Please tell me, with some specificity, what Zionist propaganda did Sandra Sufian debunk?”
            I’ll quote from the book review that you apparently didn’t read:
            “Sufian also illuminates other contentious aspects of the malaria eradication process. For example, she documents Arab participation in and contributions to such efforts, contradicting the Jewish Agency’s claims that the great majority of the eradication schemes were carried out solely at that organization’s expense. Much of this is illustrated through the work of Dr. Tawfiq Canaan, a Palestinian Arab and prominent physician before and during the Mandate era (…)”
            As you may notice here (and also in the pages about Kanaan available on google.book or maybe Amazon, I can’t remember where I read the pages concerning Kanaan) Sufian speaks about Arab contribution to the eradication and not only treatment.
            I think you should contact her if you don’t agree with her findings !

          14. @ Deir Yassin: Does Peres think a barren sliver of land would be contested by scores of civilizations for centuries if there was not something there that was very desirable? If it was as worthless as he makes it out to be it would have been a backwater going back to the dawn of history. Instead, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have died fighting battles for control of that “tiny, worthless piece of dirt.” Why, I wonder?

          15. @Deir Yassin

            Perhaps I could have been more clear.

            ‘Tawfik Canaan was the Director of the Malaria Branch of the International Health Bureau. The Malaria Branch was established by the German Society for Fighting Malaria, The Jewish Health Bureau, and the Jewish Physicians and Scientists for Improivng Health in Palestine’.–K. Nashef, Tawfik Canaan: His Life and Work, cit., p. 8.

            To wit; Whatever Dr. Canaan contributed to the eradication of malaria, it was Zionism that provided him the tools to fight the disease.

          16. @ Lotta: Nonsense. There were three sponsoring agencies. One of them wasn’t Zionist at all. How do you know who gave him “the tools?” Can you prove your claim? If you can’t you won’t be commenting here long. The rule: if you make a claim you substantiate with real evidence from a credible source. A claim is not evidence.

            Follow the rules!

          17. @Richard Silverstein

            “Those 7,000 Israelis (not Jews, since they didn’t die as Jews, but as Israelis) died as a result of Ben Gurion’s reckless provocation”

            I am sorry, Mr. Silverstein, but I must disagree with you, since your numbers are wrong.

            By March 1, 1948, 546 Jews, mostly civilians, had been murdered; and, by Ben-Gurion’s declaration of independence, the total was over 1,000.– The Palestine Post, Jan. 2, 7, 27, Feb. 2, Mar. 2, Apr. 1, May 1,

            As far as Dr. Tafik Canaan, he has tried, and failed, to prove a large Arab effort to eradicate malaria in Palestine. Arab villages, using Arab labourers, were forced by the Mandatory to drain wadis, etc.

          18. @ Lotta: First, you’ve only proven that 1/7 of the Israelis killed died before the War. The remaining 6/7 died directly as a result of a war Ben Gurion provoked. Further, you conveniently don’t mention how many Palestinians and other Arabs were killed during these periods. Why is that?

          19. @Richard Silverstein

            Apropos of Dr. Kliegler, I cite to, http://www.kuvinfoundation.org/malaria-conference

            I have not forgotten the Arab deaths during 1948. The number is uncertain, between 8,000 and 12,000, depending on who you ask.

            The number of Jewish dead was actually 6,600. By percentage of population (1%), a very high number of deaths during wartime.

          20. @ Lotta: I object to calling these people “Jewish” dead. They are Israelis. If you do this again I will consider it deliberate provocation & consider moderating you.

            You are now officially done in this thread. Move on.

          21. @ Arie
            I totally forgot that ! It was a great moment when Erdogan scolded Papy Peres, and Amr Moussa just sat there without saying anything.
            I think I’ll just take another look, I haven’t watched it for years 🙂

        2. @ Lotta
          I’m sure you didn’t know anything about Tawfiq Kanaan (a prominent ethnographer too) before I mentioned him yesterday, and now you pick random informations to support your BS.
          “Whatever Dr. Canaan contributed to the eradication of malaria, it was Zionism that provided him the tools to fight the disease”
          Haha, you just picked one information about Kanaan (he’s probably the greatest Palestinian intellectual in the 20th century), Kanaan (I prefer the correct transcription of his name with a ‘k’) worked on malaria even during the Ottoman era. Why don’t you read the book by Sufian, or even the book review which clearly indicates that your above statement is BS. I guess you have a colonial mindset too.
          The fact is that you claimed Peres’s statement about there being nothing in Palestine prior to Zionism is a historical fact.
          PS. You still didn’t tell us: what were your prior pen names ?

          1. @ Deir Yassin: One thing I can say is that “Lotta” is from Australia according to her IP address. I’ve reviewed the name she’s using in her e mail address & there is no record of any reference to it on the internet (according to my Google search). That raises a red flag in my book. But I don’t require people to identify themselves personally as long as they obey the rules & don’t engage in hanky-panky in the threads.

          2. @ Richard
            I thought it was Barbar Ltd. back on the track, we haven’t heard from him for a while.

        3. Peres has probably lied on many occasions in his life but of his public lies I remember particularly those he came up with in his angry exchange with Erdogan about Gaza in Davos, more than seven years ago.

          I will list here some of his fibs:

          Israel was interested in Gaza flourishing. It had wanted to see another Singapore there. Gaza was in fact nine times bigger than Singapore and Singapore had four million people whereas Gaza had only one and a half million (according to the CIA World Fact Book the Gaza Strip measures 360 sq kms and Singapore 682,7 sq. kms – he couldn’t even get that right).

          2. The crossings had always been open and there had always been a sufficient supply of fuel, food and electricity. he had personally read the reports on this every week and was satisfied that nothing was wanting.

          3. Because of Israel’s interest in Gaza’s welfare it had invested money in for instance the glass culture of strawberries but those Palestinians had destroyed it. Why?

          The answer is of course that that glass culture was no longer viable when Israel shut off the water supply and closed the borde

      2. @Elizabeth: And what is incorrect in what he said? (Not the title of the video which is NOT what he said)
        I will leave it at that to avoid the Richard ax.

        1. I saw Peres making that remark at the time, watching the Dutch news, and my jaw just dropped. I found it again, on youtube, and it had a crude caption. Too bad.

          Back to what Peres said: “Many Palestinaian children die, very few Israel children die.”

          (Hmm, I suppose that is the ‘correct’ part you refer to?)

          And now to his next sentence: “Why? Because WE take care of our children.”

          So, the Israeli’s take care of their children and the Palestinians do not, and as a consequence their children die. This blood libel directed at the Palestinians (they do not love and care for their children enough) by the way, has a long history in Israel (see Golda Meir).

          It seems you agree.

          In order to agree with this, you really need to be wrapped up in your Ziones ‘narrative’, because what people like me, who grew up outside of your bubble see is this:

          There is a tiny coastal enclave, filled with people who were ethnically cleansed from what is now Israel (80% of Gaza inhabitants are people driven out of Israel and their descendants). They are empoverished by a naval, land and air blockade.

          From time to time they lob some home-made projectiles over the fence that locks them in, to their prosperous neighbors, who took their land, and who have one of the most well-equipped armies in the world. This army is financially assisted in a way that is unprecedented in world history by the US.

          Their projectiles are largely symbolic, make hardly any damage or victims. (And by the way, usually come from groups that Hamas tries to suppress, but never mind: Bomb the Gaza strip anyway. It makes the political party in charge in Israel get more votes in the next Israeli election.)

          So hardly any Israeli children die because Israelis care for their children? With such an ‘army’ as an opponent it would be a miracle if many Israeli children died.

          Now to the part implied by Peres: WE take care of our children and they don’t.

          It is not our fault, when we bomb a defenseless people, whose land we took, who have nowhere to flee, with the most advanced military equipment in the world, and their children die. It is THEIR fault, because they do not care enough for their children.

          We are blameless, because Hamas uses concrete to build smuggle tunnels.

          There you have it.

          Case closed.

          (As if they could build enough shelters for the population to hide in, with all the concrete and money in the world, in that overcrowded strip of land.)

          Good luck with wiping Israel’s next carnage there (which is no doubt already in the books) from your conscience Yehuda.

  2. From Deir Yassin:
    “Walter Ballin is quoting Shimon Peres from my comment. As I read Walter, he doesn’t agree, but he was taught the same thing during his scool days.”

    Thank you! That is correct. Maybe I should have said that we were all taught the false narrative, but I think that most people get what I said.

    1. My mistake. Didn’t notice the quotes around the first paragraph. In any case, my comment seems to be a good refutation of the original Zionist claim that Israel inherited a desert and miraculously turned it into a garden. But that blatant lie was refuted decades ago so perhaps further refutation is a little redundant.

      1. Although not as many, unfortunately there are people who still believe that stuff. I believed that when I was very young, until I read more.

  3. @Lotta: It’s to be expected that, when you invade a foreign land, you will most likely meet some opposition and suffer deaths among your number. Whether it’s appropriate to say the dead among the invading army were ‘murdered’, is however, questionable. As for ridding the land of malaria. Don’t you think it’s a tad unreasonable to expect the natives to be grateful for that if you expel them from the land in the process?!

  4. For someone who “fights Israeli whitewashing”, Richard practices Palestinian terror whitewashing.

    I guess it is ok b/c it is progressive liberal humanitarian crap.

    Richard write ”
    Palestinian assailant wounds six people in Jerusalem, then shot dead – police ead – police http://buff.ly/2dG4hGF

    Article linked reads “Palestinian kills two people in Jerusalem, then shot dead – police”

    https://mobile.twitter.com/richards1052/status/785059959461543936

    How lazy and stupid you think people are?

    1. No, it isn’t Richard writing “Palestinian assailant wounds six people in Jerusalem, then shot dead – police said”; In fact it’s Reuters, as everyone can see if they click on the second link to Richard’s twitter How lazy and stupid do YOU think people are ?

    2. @ Batumi:

      Richard practices Palestinian terror whitewashing.

      Read my comment rules before you try to publish another comment here. And you withdraw that smear about whitewashing terror. If you don’t within six hours, here in public, I will ban you.

  5. @ToivoS

    You’re free to have a go at Israelis, but please leave their trees alone, especially since you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.

    The most common transplanted conifer is the Aleppo Pine, know in Israel as ‘oren yerushalayim’.
    The British Mandatory began planting them in the 1930’s. Israel has continued planting them, as part of their national afforestation program, because they are fast growing.

    The point was never to grow trees for tree’s sake, but to build up the underbrush beneath the trees. That having been accomplished by the first generation of Aleppo Pine, the hearty underbrush can now sustain other, more native, trees.

    If your a tree hugger like me, than come to Israel and hug this beautiful old gal. It’s a jujube from in Ein Hatzeva, biblical Tamar!

    http://www.timesofisrael.com/rooted-in-israels-history-five-remarkable-trees/

    http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/clearing-the-pine-tree-s-name-1.238758

    1. I do remember the days when Americans who supported Israeli were sending pine saplings to Israel so they could grow a new forest. Tourist to Israel would pack them up, carry them in their packages and then plant them on the land of Israel. Those pine saplings were not very likely native Palestinian conifers. They were provided by local (US) nurseries. Are you telling us that Israel was exporting Aleppo pines to the US so their fervent followers could buy them here so they could then carefully carry them back to Israel to be planted there? Why did the Carmel fire take out those forests so quickly? How many Israelis died in that inferno? Something does not smell right in your “understanding” of what happened.

    2. @ Lotta: sorry sweetheart: read Leslie Hazelton’s book on the subject in which she notes the reason why there have been so many massive fires in Jerusalem forests is that non-native species were planted there. Yes, pines are fast growing. But the pines planted are not suited because they cannot withstand drought, & burn like matchsticks. So if you think these fires wiping out huge sectors of the regional forest were OK or acceptable, you know even less than you think. Not to mention those widely planted damn eucalyptus trees, native to your Australia, whose internal oils fuels such fires.

      Sorry, but I trust Leslie Hazelton far more than you. Read her book, then return to argue.

      I never would’ve thought a hasbarist could turn a tree into a weapon in the hasbara wars. But you’ve done it!

      You are now officially done in this thread. Do not comment further here.

      1. We who have been around here for a while, know Barbar (or Barbarella as I call him when, he starts impersonating a female persona again). He likes to present himself as someone he is not. It is always easy to identify him, because he never reads the stuff he links to. Pretty hilarious.

  6. Peres did what he should to make Israel survivrs in this Jungle.
    We dont need the examples from 1948 and before , we see it everyday in Syria. How arabs threat their own brothers.
    For all Israel lovers who wrote here, lsrael is here forever if you like it or not.

    1. In the forties, and before, Europe was the jungle. The greatest slaughters in human history occurred then, in Europe. Just think of the useless slaughter of WW1.
      So what was your point about Arabs again?
      And by the way, Israel in its present shape WILL disappear still during my lifetime if the right wing trend in Israel continues.

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