Website review: Johann Hari: Israel is suppressing ...
advena discovered this in Israel
•4 reviews since Apr 28, 2008
israel, palestine, human-rights
•independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann...
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advena discovered 3 months ago- Regarding Israel's 60th birthday: I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer's, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes. She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality. But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison. Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..." He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage. Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions". So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be "a light unto the nations" end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?
- peterchauncy rated 3 months ago
- From the page: "only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage"
- buckylasturd rated 3 months ago
- What the article forgets to mention, is that the League of Nations in 1922 ruled at the San Remo conference, that the Jewish National Home was in Palestine, and authorized a right of return to any Jews who wished to do so, to return and settle the country. The Jewish national homeland was therefore already international law long before WWII. What the author also forgets to mention, is that the 1948 Arab aggression against the UN authorized State of Israel created TWO refugee problems, one Arab and one Jewish. The Jewish one was solved because Israel painfully absorbed some 700,000 Jewish refugees from the Arab countries after 1948, leaving almost no Jews behind. By contrast, the Arab states refused to absorb the 700,000 Arab refugees from Palestine - not even on the Jewish properties left behind by the Jewish refugees.
