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PMWATCH
- May 20, 2002 -- One year ago this week, on May 23, 2001,
The Sharm El-Sheikh Fact-Finding committee issued its final
report, now commonly known as the Mitchell
Report. In that report, the committee recommended, among
other things, that the Government of Israel "should freeze all
settlement activity, including the 'natural growth' of existing
settlements." The report was subsequently fully endorsed by
the US State Department and the White House, and adopted as
a backbone of US policy towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Since then,
however, settlement construction has continued unabated, with
the latest announcement this week of plans for the construction
of new 957 Jewish homes in the West Bank (see story below).
More
than that: according to the latest report
from the Israeli human rights group Btselem, while settlements
are built on 1.7% of West Bank land, Israel in fact has control
of 41.9% of the land there.
As the
new focus has now turned to "reforming" the Palestinian Authority
and turning it into a model of democracy for the rest of the
Arab world, it is important to keep in mind the time-tested
strategy that has informed every single Israeli government,
Labor or Likud, since Israel's inception, in their handling
of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: stall, delay, confuse and
obfuscate, and buy more time to build more facts on the ground.
Just to put things in perspective: it has now been almost two
years since the outbreak of the second intifada, almost ten
years since the September 13, 1993 Rose Gadren handshake between
Rabin and Arafat, sixteen years since the outbreak of the first
intifada, and thirty six years since the occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza started back in 1967.
And yet,
the focus continues to be about everything else BUT what Israel
is doing, routinely, as a matter of course, in the Occupied
Territories: destroying Palestinian homes, confiscating Palestinian
land, and building and expanding illegal settlements.
Where are
the editorials, and where are the news stories about the biggest
of all acts of incitement -- taking over more land, even as
the region teeters at the edge of the abyss of war, and building
more settlements?
For more
on illegal Israeli settlement building, please visit the Btselem
Web site.
Please
drop a note and urge the media to keep a sense of perspective
and not to have the debate framed for it by the Israeli propaganda
machine.
Your letter
will be sent to:
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Palestine
Media Watch
http://www.pmwatch.org
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