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This My Story
My name is Mike Smith. I have read Anna Baltzer's Book, Witness in Palestine and I am very concerned about her report.
Here are some facts from the introductory pages of her book.
1. Israel's ongoing 40 year occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal and violates the Fourth Geneva Conventions as well as more than 60 United Nations resolutions. Israel has violated more UN resolutions than any other country in the history of the UN.
2. Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in Israel are denied equal rights to Jews in the same areas purely on the basis of their religion and ethnicity.
3. The Israeli army controls the movement of nearly 4 million Palestinians through a system of checkpoints, road blocks and serrated roads. By the same means Israel also limits the supply of food, water, medical supplies and other basic necessities to Palestinian civilians.
4. The Israeli army and government exercise virtually unchecked freedom to detain, threaten, arrest, imprison, torture and assassinate Palestinians often without charge or trial.
5. The Israeli government sponsors the mass transfer of Jewish Israeli citizens from Israel to Jewish-only colonies known as settlements, built illegally on internationally recognized Palestinian land in the Occupied Territories.
6. Israeli settlers suffer practically no legal consequences for building new illegal (according to international and Israeli law) settlements, expanding existing ones or for threatening or physically attacking Palestinian civilians.
7. Israeli human rights violations since September of 2000 have left more than 4 times more Palestinian civilians dead than the total number of Israelis killed by Palestinians.
8. The Wall or "Security Fence" that is currently under construction by Israel in the name of preventing terrorism in fact weaves through - not around - the West Bank effectively separating hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from there land, jobs, hospitals, schools and from each other.
9. Israel's policies of occupation and colonization have been consistent with a steady pattern of transferring the indigenous Palestinians out of Israel/Palestine and confiscating their land, water and resources for Jewish use. This process is similar to the ethnic cleansing carried out in North America, Australia and the former Yugoslavia and continues today.
I would also like to refer you to the web site
If Americans Knew where there are the statistics below:
• 24,145 Palestinian homes demolished
• 223 Israeli Settlements have been constructed on Palestinian land
• 39,000 Palestinians injured and 6,350 Palestinians killed since September, 2000
Also on this web site is a link to a video on how Palestinian women are strip searched at the Ben Gurion Airport to humilite them so they won't come back.
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