Israel

Israel is a Western-style democracy with human rights: How_is_israel_different_than_the_rest_of_the_middle_east

Concerning its treatment of those who attack it, here is an answer that was posted during the Israeli-Gaza war in the summer of 2014.

Quote:

You should be aware that almost all of the Palestinian deaths occurred as collateral damage while Israel was trying to defend its populace against these terrorist rocket attacks, and terrorist tunnelers and the like. Israel targets military objectives, warning nearby civilians in advance through phone calls and leaflets, while Israel's terrorist enemies target civilian objectives almost exclusively. As one witness, a journalist, said: "Israel uses its weapons to protect its women and children, while the cowardly Hamas uses women and children to protect its weapons" by putting them as a human shield near weapons caches and rocket launchers in Gaza. Thus Israel faces an impossible situation in which the terrorists are just waiting for their Palestinian brothers to be unintentionally killed so that they can seize the opportunity to internationally bash Israel in the gullible U.N. and the media. They shed false tears, which could have been prevented by laying down their Iran-supplied weapons and sitting down to negotiate. When Israeli civilians are killed, these same terrorists hand out candies and sing in the streets.

The Palestinian attacks violate one of the most basic rules of international humanitarian law, the rule of distinction. Article 48 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 states that "In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives." Since the rockets Hamas aims at Israeli towns are launched into civilian enclaves, each of the 12,000 or so rockets that have come into Israel from Gaza since 2005 (including over 2000 this month alone) represents a war crime. Where is all the outcry against Hamas? People are being duped into their insidious propaganda.

And incidentally, where is your outcry concerning Muslims killing thousands of Muslims in Syria? Or the fact that the last remaining Christians now have fled Mosul after Islamic State militants issued a medieval-style ultimatum threatening them with death if they stayed.
Certain facts you may not know:
1) Hamas's founding charter calls for the complete destruction of Israel.
2) Israel supplies Gaza with water, electricity, medicines and provisions. What does Hamas do? It even fires at the power station that supplies Gaza with electricity.
3) Hamas oppresses its own Palestinian population, treats women as inferior objects, and persecutes Christians while building an army of fighters dedicated to suicide and holy war.
4) Israel treats wounded Palestinians. All the time. A reporter writes: This week I saw a Palestinian girl from Gaza being evacuated in an IDF tank to a hospital in Israel. She and her mother were interviewed, from inside an Israeli hospital. They spoke of the fair treatment, the care they received, and described the soldiers who had saved them as "brave and fair." Their faces were covered, for fear of being harmed when they return to their homes in Gaza.
5) Hamas fired on the field hospital Israel established in Shejaia, a facility which only treats wounded Palestinians. Hamas did this in retaliation for the IDF's attack on Wafa Hospital in the same neighborhood. The only difference is that Wafa Hospital is used as a Hamas launching pad for missiles aimed at us. We have publicized this on film; and we also have shown footage of them concealing stockpiles of missiles in U.N. schools.
6) In recent years they have not built so much as a single bomb shelter in Gaza, shelters that could save the lives of many civilians. Instead, they built dozens of underground tunnels from which to attack Israel and try to destroy it.
7) During the first 10 days of this war, the IDF lost 10 soldiers. Some of them, like the three paratroopers, are dead because the Israeli Air Force refused to attack a specific target for fear of hurting civilians. Instead, the paratroopers entered a booby-trapped house and were blown up.
8) A significant number of the Palestinian casualties were caused by the Hamas itself, which summarily kills protesters who question their policies.
9) Israel withdrew completely Gaza in 2005. Israel gave peace a chance. Instead of peace, we got war and war again. Hamas has refused to join any cease-fire Israel agreed to. We agreed to a cease fire even though, under the current circumstances, this would have been touted as an Israeli defeat. Hamas seeks to wreak death, to terrorize, to continue to brainwash those whose brains are not already drenched with uncompromising hatred.

Jews typically understand the exile to be a punishment which lacks both the physical and spiritual benefits of being in Divine Grace.

2) The exile finally revealed the false prophets for what they were. The false prophets had for many decades "predicted" that there never would be an exile.

3) The exile showed that, other than God, nothing can be trusted absolutely. Prior to the Destruction, some had placed their trust in the nation's ability to defeat any enemy, and some had placed their trust in the treaties which had been made with Egypt and Assyria.

4) The scattering of the Diaspora made it unrealistic for any foe to hope of destroying all the Jews.

5) The scattering of the exile enabled many righteous people to become Jews.

6) The fact of the Jews having survived the millenia-long exile has provided the world with one of the incontrovertible historical miracles. Rabbi Yaakov Emden (1697-1776) actually calls this one of the greatest miracles of all. Mark Twain, in a deservedly famous quote from 1897, wrote: "The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded...and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, and have vanished. The Jew saw them all, and survived them...all things are mortal except the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?"

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were practically no Muslim Arabs in the Holy Land. I understand that this declaration will raise protests , but it is so.

When General Allenby, the commander of the British military forces, conquered Palestine in 1917/1918, only about 5000 Muslim Arabs resided in the Holy Land.

Most of the Arabs were Christians, and most of the Muslims in the area either came from Turkey under the Ottoman Empire, or were the descendants of Jews and Christians who were forcefully converted to Islam by the Muslim conquerors.

Tourists and politicians, Arabs and non-Arabs alike, have documented their observations of the population in the Holy Land beginning more that a thousand years ago. Let's start at the early days and continue into the Ottoman period:

• The historian James Parker wrote: "During the first century after the Arab conquest [670-740 CE], the caliph and governors of Syria and the Holy Land ruled entirely over Christian and Jewish subjects. Apart from the Bedouin in the earliest days, the only Arabs west of the Jordan were the garrisons."
• In year 985 the Arab writer Muqaddasi complained: "the mosque is empty of worshipers... The Jews constitute the majority of Jerusalem's population" (The entire city of Jerusalem had only one mosque).
• In 1377, Ibn Khaldun, one of the most creditable Arab historians, wrote: "Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel extended over 1400 years... It was the Jews who implanted the culture and customs of the permanent settlement".
• In 1695, the Dutch scholar, philologist and cartographer, Adriaan Reland, visited the Holy Land. He documented his visits to many locations. He writes: The names of settlements were mostly Hebrew, some Greek, and some Latin-Roman. No settlement had an original Muslim-Arab name with a historical root in its location. Most of the inhabitants of the cities were Jews, the others were Christians. The Arabs were predominantly Christians with a tiny minority of Muslims. In Nazareth there were approximately 700 people - all Christians. In Gaza there were approximately 550 people - half of them Jews, the rest Christians. Um-El-Phachem was a village of 10 families - all Christians. Reland mentions all the Muslim Arabs as nomadic Bedouin tribes who arrived in the area as seasonal workers.

The situation changed only in the 20th century, when hundreds of thousands of Arabs emigrated to Palestine from the neighbouring Arab countries, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq being the main sources of the immigration. These Arabs do not even have a native name to describe themselves in their own Arabic language, and use the Jewish (later adopted by the Greeks) name "Plishtim", "Philistines", "Invaders" in Hebrew. So, the absolute majority of those who now claim they are "native Palestinians" are the sons , at best grandsons, of those Arabs who emigrated to Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century.

• The British Governor of the Sinai (1922-36) reported in the Palestine Royal Commission Report about the Arab immigration to Palestine: "This illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria."
• The governor of the Syrian district of Hauran, Tewfik Bey El Hurani, admitted in 1934 that in a single period of only a few months over 30,000 Syrians from Hauran had moved to Palestine.
• British Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted the Arab influx. Churchill, a veteran of the early years of the British mandate in the Holy Land, noted in 1939 that "far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population".

The name "Palestine" was given to the land of Israel and Judea by Romans.

And what if they had decided to call this land not "Philistine", but "Britannica", I am sure that the Arabs who emigrated there 1900 years later would now demand the British citizenship and call themselves "native Britons"

The nativity story in which Joseph and Mary travelled to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus is to be found in Luke's Gospel. The ruler can be King Herod the Great or Cyrenius, but not both.

Luke 1:5 says that King Herod the Great was the ruler of the country, thereby placing Jesus' birth prior to 4 BCE. Luke 2:2 says that Cyrenius was the Roman ruler of Syria, with responsibility for what was by then the Roman province of Judea, thereby placing Jesus' birth approximately 6 CE - 10 years after Herod died.

Israel and the PLO signed the Gaza-Jericho Agreement in May 1994, and the Agreement on Preparatory Transfer of Powers and Responsibilities in August, which began the process of transferring authority from Israel to the Palestinians.

On July 18 1994, a Jewish day centre in Argentina was blown up, killing 85 people. Argentine investigators concluded the attack was by Lebanese Hezbollah with Iranian assistance.

On July 25 1994 Jordan and Israel signed the Washington Declaration which formally ended the state of war that had existed between them since 1948 and on October 26 the Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace, witnessed by US President Bill Clinton.[83][84]

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on September 28 1995, in Washington. The agreement was witnessed by President Bill Clinton on behalf of the United States and by Russia, Egypt, Norway and the European Union and incorporates and supersedes the previous agreements, marking the conclusion of the first stage of negotiations between Israel and the PLO.

The agreement allowed the PLO leadership to relocate to the occupied territories and granted autonomy to the Palestinians with talks to follow regarding final status. In return the Palestinians recognized Israel's right to exist and promised to abstain from use of terror.

what i found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Israel

so answer applies to ...
Gaza Strip and Jericho