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Text of Speech given at the Palestine-Israel debate
By
Thomas
fpn@vcu.edu
http://www.studentorg.vcu.edu/fpn
It is and
always has been the goal of Israel to force out every Palestinian from the
land of Palestine to make more room for Israeli settlers.
Israel tries to make life so hard on the Palestinian people that
their only ways out are to flee or fight.
The occupation is what breed’s resistance; the occupation is what
causes the Palestinians to rise up against Israel.
If you end the occupation, you end the violence, plain and simple.
But Israel does not do that, it has become all to clear that Israel
does not want peace in any shape or form.
Ariel Sharon, the butcher and Israelis in general know that if they
end the occupation they will have to give up their precious illegal
settlements and with it their perverse dream of conquering all of
Palestine and Jordan.
Israel thinks that international law does not apply to them, and
they can completely ignore human rights, conventions and UN resolutions.
If Israel were any other country, it would have been made a
“rogue nation” and received the scorn of the international community
many years ago. But because
Israel is supported, bankrolled and armed by the United States of
Hypocrisy, that doesn’t happen.
The fourth Geneva
Convention, which Israel signed states “the Occupying power shall not
deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory
it occupies” and the UN has said in Resolution 465 of 1980 “we
determine that all measures taken by Israel to change the physical
character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of
the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including
Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel's
policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new
immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the
Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in
Time of War and also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a
comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”. The Rome
statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) also states "the
transfer directly or indirectly by the Occupying power of parts of its own
civilian population into the territory it occupies" as a War Crime
indictable by the International Criminal Court. All of these International
laws, and respected International organizations say that Israel is in the
wrong and that Israel is in violating the human rights and physical rights
of the Palestinians. Yet they
persist the implement a brutal and racist occupation of Palestinian lands.
I say racist because that is what it is.
Those checkpoints that litter the Palestinian lands guarded by
heavily armed and sadistic soldiers maintain a strict race-number plate
system. All people of Arab
decent be them Muslim, Christian, or secular are given one color license
plate, and Israelis are given another color license plate.
Guess who goes strait through the checkpoints without checks,
that’s right only the Israeli license plated cars.
Not even ambulances, schools or hospitals are safe from the horrors
of the Israeli occupation forces. Ambulance
drives have been stopped, abducted from their ambulances and made to be
human shields for Israeli soldiers going house to house. On March 30th
2002 the ambulance crew of the Ramallah EMS team were forced to be human
shields for an Israeli tank convoy for over an hour. Schools
have been closed or demolished. During
the first Intifada the Israelis shut down all Palestinian schools for 3
years. Collective punishment on school children, what did they ever do
that hurt Israel so much. Only
a couple weeks ago Israelis opened fire on a hospital, after the wounded
had been taken there from when Israel launched a missile into a crowd of
civilians.
I say this again, Israel does not want peace.
Even during the Oslo Peace accords, Israel was sponsoring the
building of new settlements within Palestine; this shows conclusively that
Israel was never planning on honoring the peace treaty, because the
settlements are the most obvious obstacle to peace, then and now.
Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority recognize a two-state
solution with Israel, yet Sharon, the butcher’s own part does not even
recognize that Palestinian people as having the right to a state. The
Likud Party platform reads and I quote “The Government of Israel
flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the
Jordan river. The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework
of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state. Thus, for
example, in matters of foreign affairs, security, immigration and ecology,
their activity shall be limited in accordance with imperatives of Israel's
existence, security and national needs”. And on the peace plan that
Israel signed at Oslo “The government succeeded in significantly
reducing the extent of territory that the Palestinians expected to receive
in the interim arrangement. The government will insist that security areas
essential to Israel's defense, including the western security area and the
Jewish settlements, shall remain under Israeli rule”. Every single time
there is a cease-fire or a lull in violence due to the Palestinian desire
for peace, Sharon destroys it viciously.
On the 23rd of July 2002 Hamas, the Islamic resistance
movement was in talks with other Palestinian resistance groups and had
decided to stop attacks on civilians within Israel itself.
This constituted a major problem for Sharon and Israel because this
was one of the first true steps toward a peace deal in the region.
Sharon made his choice; he dropped a 1-tonne bomb from a US made
fighter jet into the densely packed neighborhoods of Gaza.
In addition to killing a Hamas activist the bomb killed 15
civilians including 8 children and wounded 140 others.
Hamas vowed revenge and Sharon, the butcher called it “a great
success” A quick side note on Hamas, widely regarded as the most
militant of Palestinian resistance groups it was supported in the late
1970’s by Israel who saw them as a valuable and infiltratable
alternative to the leftist, nationalist Palestinian Liberation
Organization headed by Yassir Arafat.
A very senior US intelligence official said “The thinking on the
part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and
the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the
peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place.”
The answer to
the problem is simple. A complete withdrawal of all Israeli Occupying
forces from all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, the
dismantlement of all checkpoints and settlements within those areas and
the creation of a fully recognized sovereign state of Palestine with East
Jerusalem as its capital. This
is the start that is needed to heal the many wounds that Israel’s
creation has inflicted upon all peoples of the Middle East be them Muslim,
Christian, Jewish, or secular.
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