Skip to main content

It's disgraceful and an abomination...and illegal to boot

Whatever one might have read or seen on TV about the situation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, cannot prepare one for the reality of seeing for one self what is happening on the ground. The interminable lines and waiting at border-crossings, the separate roads for Palestinians and Israels (apartheid at its best!) the demolitions of houses [see here and here] and what is thrown up by the Israelis, in the most calculated and deliberate way, to make life difficult and irritating for Palestinians. A few things not widely reported:

  • making telephone calls into the West Bank, even to a large town like Ramallah, can be difficult, if not downright impossible
  • traffic lights at intersections configured so that in the direction Israelis are travelling the lights are green far longer than for Palestinians driving in the direction they do. Or roundabouts of Israeli and Palestinian roads where the roundabout is so designed to give Israeli drivers preference
  • at a demonstration at Bil'in the IDF using water-cannon to disperse the crowd - but using raw sewage instead of water in those cannons.
For a country which claims to be a democracy and a "light unto the nations" nothing could be further from the truth. The approach of the Israelis in the way they treat the Palestinians is scandalous, an abomination, disgraceful and disgusting.......and in most instances totally and utterly and unarguably against international and humanitarian law. All right-minded and decent people need to roundly condemn Israel.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Palestinian children in irons. UK to investigate

Not for the first time does MPS wonder what sort of country it is when Israel so flagrently allows what can only be described as barbaric and inhuman behaviour to be undertaken by, amongst others, its IDF. No one has seemingly challenged Israel's actions. However, perhaps it's gone a bridge too far - as The Independent reports. The Foreign Office revealed last night that it would be challenging the Israelis over their treatment of Palestinian children after a report by a delegation of senior British lawyers revealed unconscionable practices, such as hooding and the use of leg irons. In the first investigation of its kind, a team of nine senior legal figures examined how Palestinians as young as 12 were treated when arrested. Their shocking report Children in Military Custody details claims that youngsters are dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, have their wrists bound behind their backs, and are blindfolded and made to kneel or lie face down in military vehi...
Post a Comment
Read more