With the peace process going nowhere, common experience on both sides of the Green Line is creating a new reality
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- Seumas Milne, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 November 2010
In a quiet street in the Sheikh Jarrah district of occupied East Jerusalem 88-year-old Rifka al-Kurd is explaining how she came to live in the house she and her husband built as Palestinian refugees in the 1950s. As she speaks, three young ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers swagger in to stake their claim to the front part of the building, shouting abuse in Hebrew and broken Arabic: “Arab animals”, “shut up, whore”.
There is a brief physical confrontation with Rifka’s daughter as the settlers barricade themselves in to the rooms they have occupied since last winter. That was when they finally won a court order to take over the Kurd family’s extension on the grounds that it was built without permission – which Palestinians in Jerusalem are almost never granted. It is an ugly scene, the settlers’ chilling arrogance underpinned by the certain knowledge that they can call in the police and army at will.
But such takeovers of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah have become commonplace, and the focus of continual protest. The same is true in nearby Silwan, home to upwards of 30,000 Palestinians next to the Old City, where 88 homes to 1,500 Palestinians have been lined up for demolition to make way for a King David theme park and hundreds of settlers are protected round the clock by trigger-happy security guards.
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1 comment:
What is happening with the Palestinian population within Israel or in the Occupied Territories at the hands of the Zionist colonial power is well articulated here by Seumas Milne. He is telling the facts when he writes:
“Israel’s latest settlement plans were not “helpful”, Barack Obama ventured on Tuesday. But while US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian negotiations go nowhere and attention has been focused on the brutal siege of Gaza, the colonisation goes on. It is also proceeding apace in Israel proper, where the demolition of Palestinian Bedouin villages around the Negev desert has accelerated under Binyamin Netanyahu.”
I am sure Mr Milne as a journalist and writer knows fully well how the right-wing people who defend the expansionist policies of the Zionist State of Israel, the expropriation of the Palestinian land and deprivation of their legitimate aspirations under a brutal occupying power will continue to vilify anyone who dares to tell the truth. Some comments here show that.
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