Israel wages a policy of deliberate destruction

by ANDREA WHITMORE; Special to The Star

(ANDREA WHITMORE ON TREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS)

Jimmy Carter's best-selling book, "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid," is causing quite a stir. Those who've read the book know that Carter writes about Palestine (as the title says), not Israel. Palestine is the area designated by the international community as Arab and includes the West Bank and Gaza.

I have not been to Gaza, but in 2004 visited the West Bank and Israel with Interfaith Peace Builders, an ecumenical group whose tours are often led by rabbis. In Israel, we met with soldiers, university students, settlers and peace groups. In Palestine (the West Bank) we visited the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron, walking first under a canopy of trash that illegal Israeli settlers throw down on the heads of the native people.

Settlers have poisoned sheep, forced the closure of native markets and attacked children trying to get to school. Peacemaker Team internationals, pledged to nonviolence, accompany the children. They, too, are attacked.

While there, we saw a young American led to a doctor appointment because of a settler attack, her leg in a brace, her arm in a cast. Her co-worker was in the hospital with a collapsed lung and broken ribs. They'd been leading small children to school.

Israelis frequently close schools and universities in Palestine, often for months at a time. Roads in Palestine, where illegal Israeli settlers have hundreds of colonies, allow Israelis only. Special license plates assure this. Native roads are poor and often blocked by cement, mounds of dirt or soldiers.

Palestinians must carry identity cards and can be stopped at the whim of any 18-year-old soldier.

Palestinians are restricted to small enclaves, walled ghettos. This is the end game for the Israeli government, a "state" for the native people with few contiguous borders, no control over borders or trade and little ability to move freely to visit family, go to school or university, or receive medical care. This is enforced with a heavy military presence and helicopters overhead. Even Bethlehem, a Christian town, is now surrounded by a concrete wall, the Church of the Nativity pockmarked with Israeli bullets, as is (Catholic) Bethlehem University. People are poor because they cannot move from place to place to trade. Children are starving. Water is scarce.

Israelis have usurped supplies. Palestinians sometimes don't have enough to drink.

In the United States we ve been taught that Arabs are somehow lesser; hence, we don't object to the slow and deliberate destruction of Palestinian society and the theft of their homes and land, all of it happening on land legally designated theirs. Israelis are not supposed to be there.

Read Jimmy Carter's book, take a trip to Palestine. Judge for yourselves.

Andrea Whitmore is president of Citizens for Justice in the Middle East. She lives in Fairway.