Observations, articles, opinions etc. in Dutch and English. The author, Bert de Bruin (Yonathan Dror Bar-On), is a Dutch-Jewish historian, who has specialized in modern Jewish history and in the history of the Middle East, and who in 1995 emigrated from the Netherlands to Israel. In July 2008 his first book, Israel en ik - Vijftien bekende Nederlanders over hun verhouding met een zestigjarige (Israel and I - Fifteen well-known Dutchmen and -women on their relationship with a 60-year-old), was published. He also edited Een veilig Israel in een vreedzaam Midden-Oosten (A Safe Israel in a Peaceful Middle-East), which contains speeches (by Paul Bremer, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Dan Meridor, Mark Rutte, Maxime Verhagen and others) held at an international conference in the Peace Palace in The Hague in March 2010. For feedback please post a comment, or send this blog's author an email.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Some more examples of non-violence, settler-style:
One police officer was wounded when settlers threw acid in his eyes. The officer began shouting "I can't see!" Rioters sprayed another policeman with gas and he suffered from burns on his back. Youths also assaulted senior officers and journalists present at the scene, destroying a camera of a Reuters photographer, throwing paint and cleaning fluids at an army colonel, and breaking the glasses of another journalist. Two settlers were also lightly wounded during in the clashes.
In the end all this will make the work of the security forces easier. Not only will the settlers lose even more of the sympathy and the respect they still have among ordinary Israelis, but also is it less difficult for soldiers and policemen and -women to deal with violent than with truly non-violent resistance. This is one of the reasons why the work of organizations such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas enables Israel to continue the occupation. If a vast majority of Palestinians would choose veritable non-violence as their means to achieve independence, there is no way that Israel could stop them. Ghandi ( the original one, not Mr Ze'evi z"l ) achieved much more than Yasser Arafat, and the latter was only able to achieve anything for his people when he ( pretended to have ) renounced violence.

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