I’ve been to Gaza nine times already ... And suddenly there was a hell of a crash on the bow, and another crash, and a third crash on the port beam opposite where I was sitting ... The bow dipped for the first crash. And the master said, ‘We’ve been rammed.’ We deployed life-vests ... I thought the boat was breaking up. And Cynthia said, ‘I can’t swim’ ... 53 miles off the Israeli coast ... He said first of all you are terrorists. We had three tons of medical supplies on board from the Cypriot government ... Then he said we were subversives. And the third thing he said he was going to shoot us. David Halpin, Alternative View II conference lecture 31st May 2009, ‘The Vortex Sucks Ever Louder’
We are a greedy occupier, looting their land, uprooting, and demolishing and expelling. Shulamit Aloni, article Ha’Aretz 23rd July 2003, ‘Our Foppish Self-Righteousness’
They don’t present it as saying Israel is the aggressor, Israel is killing people on their own land, in their own homes, as an occupier. But no, Israel is defending itself. Hanan Ashwari, Palestinian Legislative Council
And yet you have hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed and you never get to know their names. Hanan Ashwari
Gaza City July 2014: More than five hundred children were killed last summer in a war between Israel and Gaza ... Their third war in six years. Lyse Doucet, Children of the Gaza War BBC 2015
An ideology that divides the world into those who are worth more and those who are worth less, into superior and inferior beings, does not have to reach the dimensions of the German genocide to be wrong. Amir Hass, Israeli journalist
The reason that Israel has been able to appropriate Palestine unto itself with American aid and support is that Israel controls the explanation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Paul Craig Roberts
It is not important what the Gentiles say, what matters is what the Jews do. David Ben-Gurion
A Jewish state ... will serve as an important and decisive stage in the realization of Zionism. David Ben-Gurion
I do not deny the Palestinians any place to stand or opinion in every matter. But certainly I am not prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner. Haim Herzog, former president
From 1989 onwards, the Jews of the former Soviet Union enjoyed one valuable and exclusive privilege – they were eligible for Israeli citizenship ... and within a decade one million Russian Jews had pitched up in Israel, amounting to more than 15 per cent of the population. Misha Glenny, McMafia
Russian immigrants very quickly established a complex society in Israel, which developed in parallel to the existing community. ibid.
It was the police who first noticed something odd happening ... the phenomenon of the youth gangs ... the crime wave centred on Tel Aviv. ibid.
A network of pimps, brothels, protection rackets, counterfeit documents and kidnapping. ibid.
The importation of labour into Israel is a corrupt business in which organised crime also engages ... the trafficking of indentured or slave labour as the fastest growing sector ... The brothels themselves are the bottom of this murky heap. I can barely describe the pathetic ageing women, listlessly chainsmoking in rooms seven feet by three, ready to service any passer-by for ten bucks (yes, ten bucks). ibid.
The oligarchs and organised-crime bosses started colonising Israel for a number of reasons. It was the ideal place to invest or launder money. Israel’s banking system was designed to encourage atiyah ... Israel had embraced the zeitgeist of international financial deregulation and considerably eased controls on the import and export of capital ... It had no money-laundering legislation. ibid.
Israeli police estimated that these Russians laundered between $5 and $10 billion through Israeli banks in the fifteen years following the collapse of communism. ibid.
For the Jewish oligarchs and gang bosses, Israel was both a retreat and, by dint of its passport, a door to the outside world. ibid.
The New Russians were already well settled in Israel by October 1995. ibid.
Visible wealth was increasing in striking contrast to the stagnation of the surrounding Arab countries. Less visible, however, was the steady rise in unemployment as investors directed their capital into industries with low labour requirements. ibid.
Now Israelis were about to discover that the years of champagne and excess in the 1990s had spawned a new phenomenon – indigenous Israeli organised crime. And, unlike the Russians, these people cared little about their public image. ibid.
Gambling had been the traditional industry around which the Israeli crime syndicates gathered and thrived. ibid.
Ecstasy was one of the few drugs where the American market was not yet supersaturated. Europe is the top manufacturing base ... The main Western European centre is Amsterdam, although the industrial-scale busts have been made since the turn of the millennium in Serbia and Bulgaria as well. ibid.
In 2003 the US State Department issued a report which claimed that Israel is the hub of global Ecstasy trafficking, having branched out from Europe to the US. ibid.
The DEA implied in one report that the turf was in New York, Las Vegas and Los Angeles over the Ecstasy trade may be directly linked to the open warfare between families in Israel. ibid.
But the extent of the internationalisation of organised crime and the role that Israelis played in it would not have been possible without globalisation – and one aspect in particular, the deregulation of international financial markets. ibid.
It was an attack that shocked the world. This is a story of international espionage, blackmail and targeted assassinations. A story of one of the most dangerous and daring military operations ever attempted: the story of Israel’s raid on the reactor. Raid on the Reactor, 2006
Remember this? Israeli PM Netanyahu and his happy bomb chart, and telling the world that Iran is that close to a nuke. It turns out that even his own intelligence services were calling his bluff. Abby Martin, Breaking the Set, RT 24.02.15
A reality of separation, exclusion, they’ve witnessed the destruction of the Palestinian grass roots. Abby Martin, The Empire Files: Jewish/American on Israel’s Fascism: No Hope For Change From Within, Youtube 2015, Max Blumenthal
The Israelis preceded to destroy all the Palestinian institutions in east Jerusalem. ibid.
The Israelis are responding now with unprecedented measures … Israel had a shoot to cripple policy. ibid.
One of the biggest human rights disasters on the planet. A gruelling growing military occupation that thrives off US sponsorship. Abby Martin, The Empire Files: The Untold History of Palestine & Israel ***** Youtube 2016
The British made it much easier for well-funded settlement projects to take more Palestinian land. ibid.
A wildly disproportionate death was about to begin. ibid.
In each of these villages and in hundreds more the Arab population left in its entirety … just enough were killed or roughly handled … Nearly 800,000 fled their homes in this barrage of violence. ibid.
By the end of 1948 Zionists had conquered 78% of Palestine. ibid.
In the fall of 2000 a new Intifada broke out. The Israeli military responded with force and the region was plunged into an unprecedented level of violence. This film was shot between 1997 and the summer of 2000 – a time of relative calm between Palestinians and Israelis. Promises, opening caption, 2001
7 Palestinian and Israeli children who live in and around Jerusalem. They live no more than 20 minutes from each other but they are each growing up in very separate worlds. ibid.
‘Jerusalem belongs to us!’ ibid. boy
The Jews kicked us off our land and put us in this camp.’ ibid. girl
Following the 1967 war groups of nationalist Jews established settlements here [West Bank] on what was previously Arab land. ibid.
‘If I could make my own future, all the Arabs would fly away.’ ibid. boy
Checkpoints are situated at all crossings between West Bank and Jerusalem. ibid.
‘All these old guys scare me.’ ibid. boy
‘The more Jews we kill, the fewer there will be.’ ibid. boy
‘The siege destroyed and humiliated us. We look like we’re alive but we’re not. We’re buried alive under the siege. Gaza is not Gaza any more. Gaza is destroyed through and through.’ Abby Martin & The Empire Files: Gaza Fights for Freedom, 2019
Most will never be permitted to leave. Trapped in this place are just suffering one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world … Civilians are being killed in large numbers. ibid.
The Gaza Strip is only 25 miles long and about 5 miles away. Two million Palestinians are packed into this tiny space. ibid.
An economic blockade that imposes a chokehold of poverty on Gaza. ibid.
Food scarcity is just one problem. More dangerous is the shortage of clean water. ibid.
Palestinians were routinely kicked out of their homes and forced to watch them bulldozed. ibid.
I’ve lived through so many experiences; they burn in my head. 5 Broken Cameras, 2011
1There are my five cameras; each camera is an episode in my life. ibid.