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Palestinians: Living an "invisible life" to Israelis

That Middle East conference which was supposed to take place next month has now been downgraded to a meeting and postponed to the end of November - if it takes place at all. Things aren't going well at all to get whatever was to happen up and running.

Meanwhile, the desperate plight of the Palestinians continues. The invisibility of that to Israelis is highlighted in this piece by Edward Mast from seattlepi.com:

"On a visit to Tel Aviv last month, I asked some Israeli friends what people in Israel were saying about the Palestinian situation. Not much, they told me. Israelis are more concerned about the corruption charges against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, coming on the heels of corruption charges against previous governments. Palestinians and their issues, my friends told me, are becoming more and more invisible to the Israeli people.

Palestinian lives are kept invisible in David Brumer's Oct. 10 guest column, "Despite concerns, Israel a vibrant country." Also invisible are Israel's military occupation and the ongoing takeover of Palestinian land. If Brumer had traveled to the other side of the wall, as I did, he could have witnessed the many ways that the Israeli occupation crushes people with poverty, violence and injustice.

Before visiting Tel Aviv, I spent two weeks working with a theater in the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the West Bank. During that short time, the Israeli army killed at least 15 Palestinians in the occupied territories; several killed were children. For Palestinians, these are regular occurrences. Over the past seven years, the Israeli army has killed more than 4,000 Palestinians. The majority of these, even according to Israeli statistics, have been unarmed civilians. Many thousands more have been wounded or kidnapped. The severe underreporting of Palestinian casualties in the U.S. and Israel can leave the impression that Palestinian lives have less value."

A horrifying and graphic photo and piece on the death of a 16 year Palestinian youth, crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer, can be seen here.

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