- Tonight ITV1 screens John Pilger's powerful documentary,
"Palestine is still the Issue." In this special report, Pilger
reveals the tragedy of an epic injustice that is at the root of Bush's
and Blair's threats of war.
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- LAST October, in the early hours of the morning, a young
expectant mother called Fatima Abed-Rabo awoke with intense labour pains;
and she and her husband Nasser set out in a friend's car for the hospital
in Bethlehem, in Israeli occupied Palestine.
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- The couple had been trying for a second child for three
years and had undergone fertility treatment. "The news of the pregnancy
had made us so happy," said Nasser, "that we celebrated by replacing
the tin sheeting on our home with a concrete roof."
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- The couple were stopped at the Israeli military roadblock
just outside their village. The soldiers turned them back, even though
Fatima was now haemorrhaging. They got a taxi, hoping that would be allowed
through. Again, they were turned back. No explanation was given; one soldier
mimicked Fatima's moans.
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- Fatima gave birth to her baby in the taxi. She remembers
the soldiers hurling her husband's ID into the blood on the floor.
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- "We cut the umbilical cord with a razor blade,"
she said. "My husband wrapped the tiny boy in his jacket, and eventually
one of his relatives found a back route."
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- Barely three pounds in weight, blue and in a critical
condition, the baby was dead by the time they arrived at the hospital.
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- We don't know why they did this to us," she told
me in my film on ITV tonight. "It wasn't personal. This is how they
treat all Palestinians. I'm sorry to say this, but they would rather help
an animal than an Arab."
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- STORIES like Fatima's are rarely news in Britain, yet
they are typical of the everyday treatment of the Palestinians. Human rights
groups run by Israelis have recorded hundreds of instances of pregnant
and seriously ill Palestinians being turned back at Israeli checkpoints,
including ambulances.
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- "We don't know how many have died like this,"
said a spokeswoman for the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights, "because
many people don't even bother to set out for hospital, knowing the soldiers
will stop them. "These people offer no threat to Israel. Those who
do, like the suicide bombers, of course never go through roadblocks, which
exist only to control, subjugate and humiliate ordinary people. It is like
a routine terrorism."
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- Fatima's remark about being treated worse than an animal
is apposite. It is always easier to harm or kill people who, in the eyes
of the powerful, do not matter: be it in Afghanistan or occupied Palestine.
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- Israeli soldiers enforcing the illegal occupation of
Palestinian land can cause the death of babies and other innocents, or
kill them outright, and words such as murder and terrorism are almost never
used. The same immunity has been enjoyed by those politicians who design
and permit this "routine terrorism," which is the product of
a form of colonialism.
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- Indeed, to understand both the roots and the double standards
of Bush's "war on terror," whose propaganda the Israeli regime
of Ariel Sharon has adopted almost word for word, you need to come to Palestine,
where one of the longest military occupations in modern times is now in
its 36th year.
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- When I was passing through Israeli checkpoints last May,
there were several of these routine murders. A nurse was one of them. Nine-tenths
of Palestinians killed by the Israelis are civilians; 45 per cent are teenagers
and children. In Gaza, five years ago, an amusement park opened beside
the sea. It was the only one in a deeply impoverished place populated mainly
by refugees whose families were forced off their land or out of their villages
by the Israelis.
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- "At first, it was very successful," said Walid
Al Dirawi, who looks after the deserted ruin of rusting rides and dodgem
cars. "Then the shooting started from across the road. The Israeli
settlers and soldiers shot it up every weekend, and of course people stayed
away." Behind the dodgems is a wall pock-marked with bullet holes,
like a shooting gallery.
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- THE "settlers" are mostly religious Israelis
or immigrants from Russia, America and elsewhere, who are subsidised by
the government to live in what are colonial fortresses in the midst of
Palestinian communities, guarded by the Israeli army.
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- They have no right to be there under international law,
and the United Nations says they should get out. Their justification is
usually Biblical.
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- For the Israeli state, they serve a practical purpose;
they occupy and encroach upon more and more Palestinian land, while allowing
the military to control the Palestinians with more and more roadblocks
and restrictions. Many Palestinian villages are surrounded by barbed wire,
and people require a special permit even to travel to the next one. Gaza,
where 800,000 are trapped, is surrounded by an electrified fence.
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- When Archbishop Desmond Tutu came here recently, he said:
"The way the Palestinians are treated is the way we were treated in
apartheid South Africa."
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- Trapped by checkpoints and arbitrary curfews the Palestinian
economy is in ruins. According to a US government survey, more than half
of all Palestinian children suffer from malnutrition, including chronic
malnutrition defined as stunted growth.
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- People struggle to live on less than £1 a day.
One of the most moving sights I have seen are the kites that reach for
the sky every dusk, displaying the colours of the Palestinian flag, flown
by terribly thin children from their open prison in refugee camps.
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- Cutting a swathe through this poverty and despair are
the Israeli "settlements": surreal, middle class suburbs that
are armed fortresses with watchtowers. From here, the "settlers"
shot up the amusement park. I visited one of these fortresses. What struck
me was the lushness: the constant sound of running water: sprinklers nourishing
hothouse crops and manicured gardens. On the other side of what looks like
the Berlin Wall, in impoverished Gaza, standpipes trickle and often run
dry.
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- These illegal, provocative enclaves, and their surrounding
security areas, control almost 42 per cent of occupied Palestine - a fact
that, on its own, makes mockery of the popular myth that two years ago
the Israelis made a "generous" offer to return 90 per cent of
the occupied territories, which the Palestinian Authority rejected.
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- The truth is very different. Following peace negotiations
in America in 2000, President Clinton's National Security Adviser Robert
Malley, who was there with Clinton, revealed that, although the Palestinians
rejected certain Israeli proposals, "it could also be said that Israel
rejected the unprecedented two-state solution put to them by the Palestinians,
including the following provisions: a state of Israel incorporating some
land captured in 1967 and including a very large majority of its settlers;
the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the city's history (and) security guaranteed
by a US-led international presence."
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- Shortly after it was founded in 1948, Israel controlled,
mostly as a result of a United Nations partition and partly by force, a
total of 78 per cent of historic Palestine. The Palestinians, who were
the majority, fled in an orchestrated campaign of fear and terror, or they
were expelled. These days, this would be known as "ethnic cleansing".
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- When he retired, General Moshe Dayan, Israel's military
hero, said: "Jewish places were built in the place of Arab villages.
There is not one single place in the country that did not have a former
Arab population."
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- DURING the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israelis occupied
the remaining 22 per cent of Palestine. Today, the Palestinians, seeking
to form their own independent state, want only that 22 per cent back.
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- Little of this background is known or understood widely
in Britain, even though the region is constantly in the news. Last May,
the Glasgow University Media Group, famous for its pioneering media analysis,
published a study that found TV viewers in particular were rarely told
that Palestinians were the victims of an illegal and brutal military occupation.
Only nine per cent of those interviewed were aware that the Israelis were
the occupiers. For years, representing the Israelis as oppressors has been
a taboo with always the threat of slurs of anti-Semitism (a bleak irony,
as Palestinians are Semites, too).
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- This has been manipulated by the Israeli government and
its foreign lobbies, especially in the United States where the lobby commands
most of the Congress and the White House.
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- Many Israelis, like many Jews in Britain and other counties,
condemn this intimidation, just as they condemn the occupation and are
fearful of its deeply corrupting effect on Israeli society. Recently, the
Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, said he had long believed that
Israel should give back the Occupied Territories. When I was in Israel
in May, some 50,000 Israelis crowded central Tel Aviv, demanding that the
government of Ariel Sharon made peace.
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- They are still a minority. The Palestinian suicide bombers
and their mass murder of innocents have hardened Israeli public opinion,
but what is seldom reported is that they are a relatively recent phenomenon.
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- For much of their resistance, the Palestinians have fought
back courageously with slingshots - against a modern army, equipped with
tanks, fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships.
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- Britain has a historic responsibility towards the Palestinians.
The 1917 "Balfour Declaration" promised Jews a homeland provided
it would not prejudice the rights of the non-Jewish communities. The British
famously reneged on this. Britain administered the League of Nations"
Mandate for Palestine until the partition that created Israel in 1948,
which the Palestinians call al-Nakba, "the catastrophe."
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- As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, successive
British governments have pledged to support the resolutions that have called
upon Israel to end its occupation.
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- In the General Assembly, there have been an estimated
450 resolutions calling, in one form or another, for justice for the Palestinians.
This is a world record. No country has incurred the opprobrium of the world
community as often as Israel and no country has been excused its "rogue"
behaviour so consistently, thanks to its backer, America.
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- When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, it was ordered to withdraw
by the United Nations Security Council. When the Iraqis failed to comply,
they were attacked with such force that tens of thousands were slaughtered.
When Israel seized the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza, it was ordered
to withdraw by the same UN Security council. That was 35 years ago, and
the occupation goes on.
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- On the contrary, Israel has since been rewarded with
billions of dollars worth of aid and armaments, principally by the United
States, which has helped it develop nuclear weapons and other so-called
weapons of mass destruction.
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- Britain has nurtured the hypocrisy that reached its apogee
in the United Nations General Assembly last week when George Bush, speaking
and postulating like a Mafia don, and with the full support of Tony Blair,
threatened the very existence of the UN unless it provided him with a figleaf
from behind which he could attack Iraq.
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- But it was Israel's flouting of UN resolutions on Palestine
that was the spectre in the General Assembly. Every delegate knew it, especially
the British who are fully aware of the enduring destabilising effect of
the illegal occupation.
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- They also know that it is being intensified by Ariel
Sharon, a man whom a commission of his own parliament found indirectly
but "personally responsible" for the massacre of more than 800
Palestinians in 1982 and who once boasted: "They (the Arabs) have
the numbers. We have the matches."
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- With Bush and Blair about to ignite another war in the
Middle East, justice for the Palestinians remains key to peace.
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- John Pilger's documentary, "Palestine is still the
Issue" is on
- ITV1 tonight at 11.05 p.m.
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- http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12202728&method=full&
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