RAMALLAH, March 29 (JMCC) - Passover messages published in the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz conveyed an air of despair Monday. The Jewish holiday starts on Monday and will end on April 6.
Israel has become an environmental hazard and its own greatest threat,
writes journalist Akiva Eldar
For 43 years, Israel has been ruled by people who have refused to see reality. They speak of united Jerusalem, knowing that no other country has recognized the annexation of the eastern part of the city. They sent 300,000 people to settle land they know does not belong to them. As early as September 1967, Theodor Meron, then the legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, said there was a categorical prohibition against civilian settlement in occupied territories, under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Meron - who would become the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and is now a member of the Appeals Chamber for both that court and a similar one for Rwanda - wrote to prime minister Levi Eshkol in a top-secret memorandum: I fear there is great sensitivity in the world today about the whole question of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, and any legal arguments that we try to find will not remove the heavy international pressure, from friendly states as well.
It is true that for many years, we have managed to grope our way through the dark and keep the pressure at bay. We did so with the assistance of our neighbors, who were afflicted with the same shortsightedness.
David Landau
writes that Israel is sliding towards xenophobia. He refers to personal attacks by right-wing groups against Naomi Chazan, head of an organization that funds leftist groups in Israel and the occupied
Palestinian territories.
Since last Passover, over the first year of Benjamin Netanyahu's prime ministership, Israel has slid almost inadvertently a long way down the slope that leads to McCarthyism and racism.
Inadvertently. That must be the explanation. Otherwise, how to explain the dismal fact that during this year a heinous travesty was perpetrated against Naomi Chazan - and the streets of our cities weren't seething with mass demonstrations?
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