Turning Up the Volume on a Boycott of Israel -- Anne Paxton

Tweet Local activist Anne Paxton writes about her recent trip to Palestine (portion below; whole article here: http://www.eatthestate.org/13-20/TurningUpVolume.htm):

I have just returned from an eight-day trip through the West Bank with a group of peace activists, nearly all of us Irish, who see striking parallels between the historic treatment of Ireland by England and that of Palestine by Israel. The sense of a colonial power imposing its will on the native residents is oppressive in Palestine. Since the US government has confirmed it is unable or unwilling to stop Israel's brutality against the Palestinians, the international community including average Americans must take responsibility by uniting behind the international campaign of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.

To travel through the West Bank and see what life is like for Palestinians is to understand the profound deceit in Israel's public statements about the peace process. Israel, with the world's fourth largest army, is in a race to see how much of Palestinians' land and resources it can grab and how degraded a state it can impose on Palestinians before the world catches on and stops it.

"Palestine is a fenced-in, walled-in, ghettoized society traumatized by an incredible level of violence and deprivation of basic services," says Gerard Cassidy, an activist with the Palestine Action Group of Cork, Ireland. "The policy of the state of Israel is to create facts on the ground where the demographics suit a Jewish state. They want to create unlivable conditions in the West Bank, so if the Palestinians stay, they're out of sight of the settlements. The Jewish settlers don't have to see them, they don't have to interact with them; they're like goats walking in the hills, or like any other animals you come across."

Given the massive attacks and war crimes perpetrated against Gaza in December and January, one surmises that the scale of oppression in that sealed-off, open-air prison--which the international community as well as Israelis are all but barred from witnessing--is even more appalling.

Contrary to international law, scores of UN resolutions, and all human decency, Israel accelerates its confiscation of Palestinians' land, packing the West Bank with Jewish settlements and multiplying police-state checkpoints as part of a strategy to reduce Palestinians to the status of cave dwellers beneath a Jewish enclave. A considerable amount of additional Palestinian land has been seized by Israel since the UN partitioned the land in 1948. In 2009, the thefts have become even more brazen--continuing exactly according to the plan of Ariel Sharon, who stated in 1973: "We'll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We'll insert a strip of Jewish settlement, in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlement, right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart."