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OCCUPATION: WRONG IN IRAQ, WRONG IN PALESTINE

June 2007 marked the 40th anniversary of Israel’s illegal military occupation of Palestine’s West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. This occupation denies the Palestinian people the right to self-determination, fuels bloodshed, and prevents the establishment of a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians whereby both peoples can live in freedom, dignity, and security.

If occupation is wrong in Iraq, why would it be right in Palestine?

WHY U.S. SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL’S OCCUPATION MUST END

While it is Israel that directly occupies these Palestinian lands, it is our government that provides Israel the military, economic, and diplomatic support Israel depends on to sustain its military occupation. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. financial aid in the world, receiving $7.7 million per day in direct U.S. aid. Washington views this support as central to U.S. efforts to dominate the Middle East for U.S. economic and military advantage.

Worse, Bush has given unqualified support to the illegal occupation policies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He has backed Sharon’s brutal military measures, extra-judicial assassinations, and apartheid-like wall snaking through the West Bank. In April Bush abandoned decades of formal U.S. policy and backed Sharon’s unilateral plans to keep Israel’s colonial settlements built on occupied territory and reject Palestinian refugees’ right to return to the properties from which they were driven out by Israeli militias during the 1948 war.

Sharon’s policies trample on the human rights of Palestinians, violate international law, flaunt U.N. authority, and fuel the tragic cycle of violence. But with a blank check from the U.S., Sharon faces few obstacles to pursuing his reckless dream of taking “as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible,” as Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe recently put it. Without that blank check, Sharon would feel pressured to end Israel’s occupation, remove the settlements, and negotiate a just Palestinian/Israeli peace.

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