In 2007 Jimmy Carter wrote the book Palestine: Peace or Apartheid. Carter's criticism of Israel and his use of the word "apartheid" shocked many people, earned him the wrath of many supporters of Israel, and made him an outcast in the ex-presidents' "club". Even in group photos the other living presidents keet their distance from him. Carter's book explained what Israel had to do to bring a permanent peace and dignity to the Palestinian people, and peace to Israel.
Israel not only chose apartheid, built a "security wall" (i.e. The Apartheid Wall) to imprison Palestinians in the West Bank, which is now the world's largest outdoor prison, but also continued the criminal pursuit of ethnic cleansing. Israel is an apartheid state and enforces strict segregation of Palestinians, especially in occupied Palestine.
Palestine is about 1/10 the size it was before the United Nations partitioned it to make room for the State of Israel in 1947. The "Israeli Arab War" of 1948 was an ethnic cleansing project that cleared whole Palestinian villages, caused hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee in panic to become refugees, and Israel massacred thousands of Palestinians. After the 1967 "Six Day War" Israel has been ethnically cleansing the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza.
Israel is squeezing the West Bank into a smaller and smaller area, restricting the free movement of Palestinians, taking their land and giving it to illegal Israeli settlers, demolishing homes; and constructed superhighways that only Israelis are allowed to use, created militarized zones, set up hundreds of checkpoints, and built the Apartheid Wall to imprison Palestinians.
Israel has partitioned the West Bank into three separate areas (areas A, B and C), and has made it extremely difficult for Palestinians to travel from one area to another, thus separating families and friends and stifling commerce. It now takes hours for Palestinians to travel from one place to another, instead of minutes. Checkpoints make some places impossible to reach. Israel is gradually herding Palestinians into ghettos. It is apartheid!
In Jerusalem the Israelis are likewise making Palestinian lives difficult in order to force them to emigrate to the West Bank or to immigrate to a foreign country. The same methods used in the West Bank are used in Jerusalem, only more so by my observation. Israel also makes the "misery index" very high in many West Bank cities, such as Ramallah, Hebron and Nablus, where illegal Israeli settlers are taking over.
It is nearly impossible to get into or out of Gaza, and anyone who follows the news would know that Israel "cuts the grass" regularly and has put Gazans "on a diet". For the uninformed "cutting the grass" and "on a diet" are sadistic Israeli phrases that mean bombing Gaza back to the stone age, making it unlivable, and limiting food delivery per capita to the minimum required not to starve to death.
Restrictions on imports into Gaza are enforced on other essentials such as medicine, construction material, machinery, water, and supplies of all sorts...including educational material and toys for children. Gaza is the world's largest outdoor concentration camp, reminiscent of those used in Nazi Germany.
Now that I have been personally touring Palestine with various human rights groups, it is clear to me that Israel has not only chosen apartheid and ethnic cleansing, but it has also chosen genocide. That is not hyperbole. What Israel is doing to Palestinians clearly meets the internationally accepted definition of genocide:
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such by:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
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