LOSING GROUND
Israel, Poverty and the Palestinians
This week the charity Christian Aid published a report that describes in detail the situation at present in Palestine. It has been criticised heavily by zionist and jewish groups who are accusing it of being unbalanced and without understanding. It even caused a reaction from the Israeli ambassador who said
“It does not demonstrate a fair and objective understanding of a complex situation. Christian Aid has not only failed its supporters but also the Palestinian people.”
As usual any form of information that comes to surface in the public domain that risks exposing the truth is immediately set upon by a frenzy of rebuttals and attempts to slur the character of the authors. It is textbook media warfare at its best.
But we understand this warfare and we know the steps they take.
So firstly read the full ARTICLE and then pass it to as many people that you can, spread the truth. (The article is in pdf format and it requires Acrobat Reader to view it)
Secondly here are some key points from it:
-
Responsibility for the current humanitarian crisis rests principally with Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian Territories.
-
Israeli control over access to water limits Palestinian irrigation for agriculture, the drilling of boreholes and personal consumption. Israelis’ allocation of water is five time that of the Palestinians. Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip use almost seven times more water than Palestinians there.
-
Placing three million people under what is effectively a seige inevitably has consequences for their health. Treatment is inaccessable; emergency care is often blocked as even Red Cresent ambulances are fired upon; malnutrition is on the rise.
-
As this report goes to press, an eight-metre high concrete wall is being built around the West Bank by the Israeli authorities. It is thought that it will run much of the length of the ‘Green Line’-the 1967 border-but at key points carves out more Palestinian land. Built at the cost of £1 million a mile, the wall is creating what some Palestinians describe as the world’s largest open-air prison. When it is completed, it will have razor wire, trenches, floodlights and electronic detectors. It will allow access to Israel only at Israeli-controlled checkpoints. When Christian Aid visited the town of Qalqilya, large areas of olive groves, farmland and homes were being cut off from the town- depriving farmers of their land and livelihoods.
In this report there are also a number of personnal testimonies from Palestinians. They are sometimes harrowing in there description of life there:
1.‘Israeli occupation forces have erected hundreds of checkpoints at the entrances of every Palestinian community, dividing the West Bank into 64 enclaves and the Gaza Strip into three sections. At these checkpoints Israeli soldiers regularly humiliate, even terrorise, Palestinians. In one instance Israeli soldiers forced Palestinians to eat even though it was the holy month of Ramadan in which observant Muslims fast from daybreak to sunset. In another case, soldiers demanded that a man who was transporting 30 large barrels of olive oil to market curse the Prophet Mohammed. When he refused, they poured all 30 drums of oil on the ground.’
- Asmahan,25, belongs to a refugee family originally from Ramla. She now lives in Gaza City. Because of the closures, it takes her up to seven-and-a-half hours to reach her relatives in Rafah, just 20 miles away - a journey that would take 45 minutes were it not for the checkpoints.
'Two weeks ago my husband left Rafah at noon to come to Gaza City. He reached Gaza at 4am. He reached the checkpoint and it closed. Then the checkpoint behind him closed and all the all the cars between the two checkpoints were locked in. Imagine it with a family, not being allowed to open the window, not being allowed to get out of the car. Imagine the anxiety of the family when they knew he had left at midday and had not arrived by dusk.
‘My daughter is three years old . At the first checkpoint going to Rafah last week she got out of the car, exclaiming: “I will go to uncle [the Israeli soldier] to ask him to open the road.” My husband jumped out to catch her. The soldiers pointed their guns at the both of them. My seven-year-old son was very frightened: “They will shoot you!” he screamed.’
The title of this report sums up the situation in Palestine very well at the present time. Losing Ground is the reality for millions of Palestinians everyday. This report goes a long way in showing the issues in Palestine today and the antecedents of how it came about. It uses maps to show the zionist machine encroaching on the farmland and villages of the local population and it destroys the zionist cry that it was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’.
Zionists are sending out MP’s throughout the year to show them the other side of the specturm: Israeli’s are being terrorised thus gaining their support. MPAC plans to go where no other Muslim Organisations have dared to. MPAC wants to send MPs over to see the truth, but cannot do this without sufficient funding.
This is your ammunition, use it where you can to convey the truth. If you do not then who will?
MPAC - Confronting A Dormant Mindset