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Continued Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine Mark Dankof and Saeb Sha'ath Interviewed in Press TV
Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, August 15, 2011
Press TV, Sat Aug 13, 2011 12:56PM GMT
Interview with Mark Dankof, former US Senate candidate, San Antonio.
The building of more illegal residences on lands occupied by Israel has
been announced while the Israeli regime fails to manage its domestic
housing crisis.
Press TV talks with Mark Dankof, former US Senate candidate from San Antonio in a discussion that includes some of the violent criminal events at the time of the establishment of the Zionist state up until the present day.
Press TV What message is Israel sending by this announcement especially given the timing - less than one month prior to Palestine's UN membership bid?
Mark Dankof There is a direct link in terms of timing. Israel is basically indicating once again that they have no intention of abiding by good will. This is in everything they have said in the past including at Oslo.
These guys are a criminal regime; they have been doing criminal things since 1948. As long as the US in particular continues to subsidize what they're doing politically and economically, this is going to continue.
The only hopeful sign that I see is that between domestic protests in Israel over their economy and the protests that I think are developing in this country [the US] over what has happened to our economy largely due to these American imperial wars that Israel has been very much involved with in terms of promoting it and as the American people continue to get sick of stuff and with more domestic discontent in Israel we might in fact see some degree of pressure both on Tel Aviv and on Washington from their own domestic populations to take a different course. That's the only hope that we have.
Press TV You mentioned that Israel has been a criminal regime since 1948, but other analysts would dispute this, saying that this current government has been the most right wing. Can you elaborate on your statement?
Mark Dankof Let's go back and look at the record - we can look at the ethnic cleansing of Arabs, the Deir Yassin massacre from the beginning of the Zionist state; let's look at the Zionist assassination of Lord Moyne (1944); the Zionist assassination of Swedish Count Bernadotte (1948); Menachem Begin and the Stern Gang and company blowing up the King David Hotel in 1947 and killing scores of civilians; there's the Lavonne Affair I believe in 1954; there's the USS Liberty where Israel deliberately attacked an American ship on June 18, 1967 and killed 34 American sailors and wounded scores of others; there's the Pollard spy case; the AIPAC spy cases; their recent activities in Gaza - Operation Cast Lead - killing 1,400 Palestinians being one example; their attacking of the Freedom Flotilla a year ago in May, which killed unarmed civilians that were simply trying to relieve the economic plight of people in Gaza and Israel by the way is illegally occupying that territory.
Press TV If we talk about al-Qods Jerusalem where facts on the ground indicate many accounts of the forceful eviction of Palestinians out of al-Qods to make way for settlers and also the excavation digging tunnels under the al-Aqsa mosque, which is rocking the foundations. Is that what's happening there in al-Qods?
Mark Dankof Well, I've believed for a long time that Israel wants this al-Aqsa mosque simply not to exist. If you look at their allies in the Christian right wing in the US who are motivated by the Schofield Reference Bible and John Hagee of the Cornerstone Church here in San Antonio, I have to agree with that.
Basically I think this is part of a systematic plan to take all of Jerusalem and to replace, in terms of some of these most extreme fanatics on the far Christian right and the far Zionist right, the al-Qods mosque with a so-called rebuilt Jewish temple based on the model of the one that was destroyed in 1870.
But I think it's also important to see this in the concept of the religious 'greater Israel.' Carol, the other guest, has been insisting that there's some big difference between left and right in Israel in regard to many of the policies of the Israeli government. The fact is if you look at the party platforms of the various mainstream parties they all refer to greater Israel, which any reasonable person that goes back into the history of this, historically and biblically, and as it has pertained to the Zionist movement since the late 19th century, is a clear reference to the Zionist desire to control all the territories from the Nile river and the Tigress and Euphrates rivers and all the way up into Lebanon...
Press TV Consider this quote, “The only path to such a peace will come through direct negotiations and not through the decisions of international bodies.” No direct negotiations have in the past stopped Israel from building these settlements - Why should Palestinians have any hope for the future? And what do you think of the prospect that in less than a month the Palestinian flag could be raised at the UN?
Mark Dankof The fact of the matter is in terms of pursing the so-called direct negotiation, there is no hope.
Take a look at the 1947-1948 UN partition between Israel and so-called Palestine and that 51 to 49 percent division that was made then. The fact of the matter is that Palestinians have lost virtually all of that 49 percent that they were supposedly granted by the UN at that juncture.
In this entire process the Palestinians have nothing but a handful of small cantons. They cannot possibly control their own destiny; they cannot possibly be granted anything approaching a reasonable and fair settlement as long as Israel continues the kinds of policies that it has pursued in the past and that it is pursuing in the present.
And when we look at the Israeli lobby in the US they're not simply happy continuing this policy of ethnic cleansing in Palestine - Mark Kirk and Charles Schumer and others are clearly angling in the US Senate to get the US to become directly involved in a war with Iran at Israel's behest.
SC/JG/JR
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