Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The bleakness of life for Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, is a mystery only to us.

In the current Israeli campaign in Gaza, now sealed off from the outside world, almost 500

Palestinians, most unarmed, have been killed. Sanctions, demanded by Israel and imposed

by the international community after the Hamas victory last January in what were universally

acknowledged to be free and fair elections, have led to the collapse of civil society in Gaza

and the West Bank, as well as widespread malnutrition. And Palestinians in the West Bank

are being encased, in open violation of international law, in a series of podlike militarized

ghettos with Israel's massive $2 billion project to build a "security barrier." This barrier

will gobble up at least 10 percent of the West Bank, including most of the precious

aquifers and at least 40,000 acres of Palestinian farmland. The project is being financed

in large part through $9 billion in American loan guarantees, although when Congress

approved the legislation in April 2003, Israel was told that the loans could be used

"only to support activities in the geographic areas which were subject to the administration

of the Government of Israel prior to June 5, 1967."

But it is in Gaza that conditions are currently reaching a full-blown humanitarian crisis. "Gaza is

in its worst condition ever," Gideon Levy wrote recently in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz. "The

Israel Defense Forces have been rampaging through Gaza -- there's no other word to

describe it -- killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately. ... How

contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical talk about 'the end of the occupation' and

'partitioning the land' now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than

before. ... This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment."

And as Gaza descends into civil war, with Hamas and Fatah factions carrying out gun battles

in the streets, Ha'aretz reporter Amira Hass bitterly notes, "The experiment was a success:

The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the

extended experiment called 'what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings

in an enclosed space like battery hens.'"

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Apartheid In The Holy Land

By Desmond Tutu

24 December, 2006
The Guardian

In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost

instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting

injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron

of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.

What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee

its existence. I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded

me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the

humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when

young white police officers prevented us from moving about.

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Jimmy Carter Speaks A Simple Truth About Palestinian Apartheid

By Chris Hedges, The Nation
Posted on December 23, 2006, Printed on December 23, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/45811/

Jimmy Carter, by publishing his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," walked straight into

the buzz saw that is the Israel lobby. Among the vitriolic attacks on the former President was

the claim by Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, that Carter

is "outrageous" and "bigoted" and that his book raises "the old canard and conspiracy theory

of Jewish control of the media, Congress, and the U.S. government." Many Democratic Party

leaders, anxious to keep the Israel lobby's money and support, have hotfooted it out the door,

with incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announcing that Carter "does not speak for the

Democratic Party on Israel."

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Israeli-Palestinian Statistics

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s major sources of instability. Americans

are directly connected to this conflict, and increasingly imperiled by its devastation.

It is the goal of If Americans Knew to provide full and accurate information on this critical issue,

and on our power – and duty – to bring a resolution.

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The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt

Faculty Research Working Papers Series

March 2006

RWP06-011

The views expressed in the KSG Faculty Research Working Paper Series are

those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the John F. Kennedy

School of Government or Harvard University.

This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the United

States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests

of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries is

based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives. As we

show below, however, neither of those explanations can account for the

remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States

provides to Israel.

Instead, the overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to

U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the "Israel Lobby." Other

special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions

they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from

what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while

simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are

essentially identical.1

In the pages that follow, we describe how the Lobby has accomplished this feat,

and how its activities have shaped America’s actions in this critical region.

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