On Tony Karon's blog, Saif Ammous offers the following rundown on human rights in the Occupied Territories (Take note, Amnesty International...):
...an observer will find an illegal Israeli occupation that has been festering for 40 years, combined with illegal ethnically-exclusive colonies built on stolen Palestinian land, and the world’s only ethnically-segregated road network, where many routes can only be accessed by Jews. An internationally-illegal apartheid barrier surrounds Palestinian towns and villages, not only cutting them off from one another, but also cutting off farmers from their lands, children from their schools, patients from their hospitals and workers from their jobs. Israel controls all of the Palestinians’ openings to the outside world, stifling not only Palestinians’ freedom of movement, but also their economy and trade. One of the world’s strongest armies, the IDF, is regularly unleashed on civilian populations...
I'll post the continuation of this paragraph here:
"One of the world’s strongest armies, the IDF, is regularly unleashed on civilian populations in Palestine, murdering thousands and killing innocent children with complete impunity. The Israeli government has as its Deputy Prime Minister an unabashed Fascist who openly and regularly calls for ethnic cleansing and mass murder of Arabs as a solution to the conflict. Israel continues to deny millions of Palestinians their legal right to return to their own homes from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948, restricts land-ownership to Jews only, and has discriminatory racist laws in countless areas from marriage to immigration."
Links to document each of these statements are provided in the original page where the article appears, since I'm not yet tech-savy enough to copy/paste them here.
Zionist apologists usually argue that there is no racist road system in the Occupied Territories because an Israeli Palestinian driving a car with Israeli plates could use the settlement road system. The claim leaves out the important qualification that the Occupied Territories are closed military zones under Israeli law, and an Israeli Palestinian would require permission to drive on the settlement roads even in a car with Israeli plates.
Technically speaking Avigdor Liberman is not a fascist because fascism is a nationalist revision of Marxism and overcoming the class conflict by means of national revival is not part of Liberman's thought.
Liberman adheres to an extreme form of politicized ethnic fundamentalism, which makes him a Nazi comparable to the members of the German NSDAP or to the Polish Endeks.
To understand Israeli Zionist mentality, I strongly recommend The Nazi Conscience by Koonz. Everything she says about Nazi Germany applies to Zionist Israel in spades.
I saw a documentary on the gaza strip, i think it was called "gaza strip"!, and the guys had to take their truckfull of goods across a BEACH because israel blocked the main road. it took them forever but they did it.
Yes, but many don't make it.
Blair's predecessor as special envoy of "the Quartet", James Wolfensohn, had put al his hope on these border crossings remaining open so that people in the Gaza strip could continue the glass house culture of the evacuated settlers. According to Uri Avnery he raised eight billion dollars for this, investing also several millions of his own money.
And then it all went down the drain.
Israel reneged on commitments to keep these border crossings open. There remained minimal possibilities to cross them by bribing officials on both sides of the border. But fresh vegetables, loaded on a truck that has to be parked for several hours while such negotiations are going on, often in the steaming heat, are not so fresh any more once the load is going through. And those who are stopped altogether can throw their rotting stuff away.
It all fits into the policy of ethnic cleansing by making life impossible for those who are "nicht erwuenscht".
Arie, things went bad because the Palestinians destroyed the green houses and attacked the erez and karni crossings on repeated occasions. They can't help it, wanton destruction and nihilism is what they do, its who they are. Witness the "throw the other guy off the roof day" they have on Gaza on a periodic basis.
I have a long discussion on the morality of land-lease discrimination at
The Magnes Zionist
http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com/2007/07/on-morality-of-land-lease.html