Wednesday, April 30, 2008

A land without people?

How does Israel treat the Palestinian civilians for whom it is responsible while maintaining it’s utterly illegal occupation of Palestinian territory? There’s a good article in the Irish Independent here, which sheds some light on one aspect of the collective punishment.

The more vivid points are outlined as follows:

“Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.”

“in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli Army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions".”


In other news, Israel is to build another 100 settler homes (BBC article here), in flagrant violation of a stack of UN resolutions.

If Israel cannot keep to the 1967 borders and dismantle the illegal settlements in the (illegally occupied) West Bank, how about we abandon the 2-state solution, and instead have a 1-state solution, with all Israelis and Palestinians living in the same state. One person, one vote. Surely the self-styled “only democracy in the Middle East” couldn’t object to that?

Failing that, how about an EU goods and services embargo against the increasingly apartheid Israel?

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