Saffuan Jaffar Blog Travel

"ISRAEL'S SEARCH FOR PEACE", 
MR AMBASSADOR?

Mr Prosor

Mr Prosor.

Nottingham university authorities have decided to invite you to speak on our campus. It might interest you to know that the vast majority of staff and students at this University have not been informed of this supposedly "public" lecture. The reason for this clear : Far from being an occasion for an honest debate about important issues of the Middle East conflict, the intention has been to stage a friction-free PR initiative to allow you to preach your goverment"s talking points in front of small, unrepresentative but sympathetic audience. Here are some facts your audience, and the wider Nottingham University community, might wish to consider before listening to your no-doubt carefully planned marketing pitch:

• Since its creation 1948, the Israeli state has been engaging in a consistent and sustained programme of expulsion and occupation against the original Palestinian inhabitans within its territories (including West Bank and The Gaza Strip). Inthe words of former US president Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter

"Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land. In order to perpetuate the occupation, Israeli forces have deprived their unwilling subjects of basic human rights."

• Today sixty years on, seven millions of Palestinian living in the Diaspora are still prevented from returning to their homes. Israel continues to deny them their basic right of return.

• Israel is pressing ahead with its settlement expansion programme, deemed illegal under international law by the United Nations, building more homes and Jewish-oly roads on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank, further fragmenting the Palestinian areas ang making a Palestinian State a virtual impossibility.

•  Israel is the only Nuclear power in the Middle East, in clear blatant violation of the Non Proliferatin treaty. Its continues to reject international inspections of its nuclear facilities and instead has persistently tried to shift attention towards other country including Iran.

•  Your goverment, Mr Prosor, has been responsible for decades of brutal attacks of Palestinian civillian popultaions including the war crimes of the Gaza offensive of December 2008-January 2009, condemned by virtual every single reputable human rights NGO including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

• The Goverment you represent boasts a racist foreign minister who has advocated the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.

• The Goverment you represent has been building a wall declared illegal by the International Criminal Court. This wall is being mostly built on confiscated Palestinian land, inflicting further suffering and misery on thousands of Palestinian civillians.

• Your goverment has imprisoned thousands Palestinian civillians without charge, Including Mohammad Othman, a Palestinian Human Right activist who has been under arrest without charge for the past 10 weeks simply for daring to tell the world abaout your goverment's crimes.

• Your goverment has consolidated an apartheid regime that treatens its own non-Jewish resident as second-class citizens and considers Palestinians unders occupation as sub-human.

• Your goverment is a major purveyor of state terrorism, as such, it is an obstacle to peace not an agent of it.

Mr Ambassador, we realize your goverment requires you to join in its latest international PR charm offensive designed to pull wool over people's eyes, but you can't hide realities with spin and you can't avoid the issues by changing the subject.

Everyone has seen the images of dead children and destroyed homes. Everyone has seen what Israel's "search for peace" really means.

You represent a racits, war-mongering, inhuman regime. You know it, your goverment knows it, and after the massacre in Gaza, the whole worlds knows it too.

Mr Ambassador, you are not welcome to our campus.