Hi to everybody...hmmm...there are some things in the world that get publicity and some things that do not, and this has been one of them...why? Tibet is now being taken up by a mass of people who haven't cared for forty years what's happened there...Zimbabwe is being discussed...what is happening to the Palestinians is being shunted off the front pages and either ignored or just one of many incidents that are so commonplace as to be not worth reporting anymore?...
Here's a shorter report than the one on the front pages of the Independent today...but still as important...
Mario Vargas Llosa: How Arabs have been driven out of Hebron.

Saturday, 19 April 2008

Hebron is the image of desolation and pain. I'm talking of the H-2 sector, the oldest part of this ancient city, which is under Israeli military control and where some 500 colonos – settlers – live in four settlements. It is one of the holiest places of Judaism and Islam, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where in February 1994, the settler Baruch Goldstein machine-gunned Muslims at prayer, killing 29 and wounding dozens.

To protect these settlers, the zone bristles with barriers, camps and military posts, and is overrun by Israeli patrols. But such mobilisation will soon be unnecessary because this part of Hebron, subject to ethnic and religious cleansing, will soon have no Arab residents.

Its centuries-old market, which was once as multi-coloured, varied and bustling as that of Jerusalem, is now empty and the doors of all the shops are sealed. Travelling around, you feel in limbo. So too when you walk through the surrounding deserted streets, with shopfronts shuttered with metal sheets and on whose roofs you glimpse military posts. The walls of this entire semi-empty neighbourhood are filled with racist inscriptions: "Death to the Arabs".

Some 25,000 residents have been cleared from their homes in H-2 zone in five years. In the Tel Rumeida neighbourhood alone, where there is a settlement of the same name, barely 50 out of 500 Arab families remain.

The extraordinary thing is that they haven't already gone, subjected as they are to systematic and ferocious harassment by settlers, who stone them, throw rubbish and excrement at their houses, invade and destroy their homes, and attack their children when they return from school, to the absolute indifference of Israeli soldiers who witness these atrocities.

No one told me this: I saw it with my own eyes and heard with my own ears from the victims themselves. I have a video of the hair-raising scene of children from Tel Rumeida settlement stoning and kicking Arab schoolchildren and their teachers who, to protect themselves, returned home in groups instead of individually. When I told Israeli friends this, some looked at me with incredulity and I saw they suspected I exaggerated or lied, as novelists often do. It turned out that none had ever set foot in Hebron.

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The amount of damage caused to the Palestinians by the Israelis so outweighs what is being done to them by the Palestinians it beggars belief that they aren't now undergoing embargoes on their products, vetoes on their rights to participate in Human Right's conferences until they change their brutal tactics, and a public denouncement by world leaders of what is going on every day in the Palestinian homelands....It also quite shocking to discover that many Jews have never met a Palestinian...they are taught that they are the enemy and, as such, any means of rendering them helpless is permitted...Mugabe is bad for Zimbabwe and we say so publicly...who is saying that what is going on in Palestine is as bad if not worse...because this is another people bringing another people to its knees in front of the whole world and we just look away...just as we did when the Jews were being carted off to the concentration camps in WW2 and it was known about and nothing was done...the same thing is happening now to the Palestinian people...and it is to the world's shame that it remains muted in its reproach or condemnation...