The International Herald Tribune does a story you wouldn't see in the U.S.; a wrenching piece on the plight of Israeli Arabs, dispossessed of their land and villages, prohibited from settling on captured lands that remain undeveloped, waiting for Jewish owners who might emigrate to the country someday, and yet remaining in Israel because they have no place else to go, and no confidence in what might someday emerge as the new Palestinian state next door. Here's a clip:
... One recent warm afternoon, Jamal Abdulhadi Mahameed drove past kibbutz fields of wheat and watermelon, up a dirt road surrounded by pine trees and cactus, and climbed the worn remains of a set of stairs, declaring in the open air: "This was my house. This is where I was born."
He said what he most wanted now, at age 69, was to leave the crowded town next door, come back to this piece of uncultivated land with the pomegranate bushes planted by his father and work it, as generations have before him. He has gone to court to get it.
Mahameed is no revolutionary and, by nearly any measure, a solid and successful citizen. His children include a doctor, two lawyers and an engineer. Yet, as an Arab, his quest for a return to his land challenges longstanding Israeli policy.
"We are prohibited from using our own land," Mahameed said as he stood in the former village of Lajoun, now a mix of overgrown scrub and pine trees surrounded by the fields of Kibbutz Megiddo. "They want to keep it available for Jews. My daughter makes no distinction between Jewish and Arab patients. Why should the state treat me differently?"
The answer has to do with the very essence of Zionism - the movement of Jewish rebirth and control over the land where Jewish statehood first flourished 2,000 years ago.
"Land is presence," remarked Clinton Bailey, an Israeli scholar who has focused on Bedouin culture. "If you want to be present here you have to have land. The country is not that big. What you cede to Arabs can no longer be used for Jews who may still want to come. Israel is here as a haven for them." ...
Discrimination against Arab citizens, both inside Israel and in the occupied territories, which Desmond Tutu and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter have variously described as Israeli Apartheid, is one of Israel's dirty little secrets, one that's much better known in Europe than the U.S. In many ways, Palestinians inside Israel are that country's African-Americans, pre-1970...
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Tell a friend
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sendmail.Subject = "Check out this website"
'send a specific page or send a site url
dim url
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
