Less than a month after the guns fell silent - despite the ear-splitting roar of Israeli jet fighters regularly searing through Lebanese air space in violation of a UN brokered “ceasefire” - my recent trip to Beirut and the war-ravaged southern Lebanon brought home the brutal reality of Israeli savagery. In scores of places where we stood knee-high deep in debris and rubble of towns and villages, the signs of life are steadily becoming more and more visible. Noises emanating from the engines of front-end loaders, tipper trucks and bulldozers clearly signal the intent of the million plus displaced Lebanese not to allow Israel to succeed in turning their homes in picturesque southern landscape into no-go “ghost” areas. Read more about Can War Be Over When Battles Remain?
As Israel’s apartheid wall colonizes 30-40 percent more of the 22 percent of Palestine that remains, an increasing number of analysts, activists, and academics have begun to challenge the two-state solution designed to bring an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With Palestinians eventually ending up with only 12-15 percent of their land, made up of disjointed ghettoes over which they will have no sovereignty- a single, secular polity that would encompass both Israel and the Occupied Territories is looking increasingly attractive. The One-State Solution written by Virginia Tilley, associate professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, lucidly demonstrates why the two-state model “is an idea whose time has passed”. Read more about Book review: "The One-State Solution"
A fresh study by a Geneva-based institution confirms a growing consensus that Israeli land grab will be the foremost factor leading to an ignoble collapse of the Zionist colonial project. Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions, a respected Swiss human rights group warns that the continued existence of Israel on the basis of “two-states” has become a practical impossibility. And all due to the Jewish state’s continuing plundering of Palestinian property. It spells out that the rate of land confiscations underway and the continued construction of the apartheid wall - which Israel refers to as its “security barrier” - will leave Palestinian territory within the Occupied West Bank and Gaza reduced to less than eight percent of Mandate Palestine. Read more about Occupation will lead to collapse of Zionism
As South Africa celebrates its 10th year of freedom from the repressive policies of apartheid, Israel has intensified its brutal repression of a just cause - now entering 56 years of dispossession and dismemberment. It is strange therefore that a disgruntled former Israeli diplomat in South Africa, has made a desperate effort to ridicule SA’s pro-Palestinian leanings. It is lamentable that Tova Herzl’s term as Israeli ambassador in Pretoria did not teach her any lessons about the stark differences which exist between her country and a post-1994 South Africa. MRN’s Iqbal Jassat comments. Read more about No Need To Embrace Israel
