PALESTINE فلسطين

In 1948, over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces. This violence has continued to the present. In Palestinian Occupied Territories, a system of apartheid exists, denying Palestinians basic human rights while allowing Jews full access to resources otherwise nonexistant to the Palestinian inhabitants. The media portrays Palestinians as "terrorists", unwilling to bring themselves to the peace table. However, no one documents the continuous expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank (illegal under international law, stated categorically in Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Conventions), the building of an imprisonment Wall (established as illegal by the World Court in July of 2004), the denial of basic Palestinian rights, nor the restrictive nature of the Israeli regime in the Occupied Territories (B'tselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories has chronicled this extensively). One thing we must acknowledge is that the conditions imposed on the occupied by the occupier have allowed the mass destruction of Palestinian spheres of life, from the economic to the social to the political. Of all the parties to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it is the Palestinians who have lost the most in national, territorial, human, and material terms. Only when we acknowledge Israeli shortcomings and crimes against humanity (such as torture: Israel was the only country in the history of the world to legalize torture from 1987-1999) can we overcome the present situation and allow prospects for peace to occur. Free Palestine!