By: Vidar Thorsteinsson

Vidar Thorsteinsson
Fri, 07 Mar 2014 16:40:31 +0000

Dear Logical Spock, I laud your concern for victims of genocide in Africa and North Korea. I wish you the very best in your future activist work on these issues. You seem unaware of the reality of the situation faced by Palestinians in the illegally Occupied Territories. In the West Bank, which is home to almost 2 million Palestinians, Palestinians and state-sponsored Israeli settlers live within miles of each other. However, the Israeli state discriminates against West Bank Palestinians in every imaginable way. As Israel has barred Palestinians living under occupation from statehood or citizenship, they have no way of asserting or exercising their human rights in any form. They live under military dictatorship, while Israeli citizens live illegally on their lands with military protection and financial subsidies from the Israeli state. The further, actual discrimination which takes place at the level of travel freedoms, access to water resources, treatment by the Israeli military, political harassment, access to schools and healthcare, and so forth, is too vast to detail here. I can recommend reports and fact sheets released by Israeli groups such as Rabbis for Human Rights, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and B'Tsalem. All are easily found on the Internet. Once you have educated yourself on Israel's systematic discrimination and oppression against Palestinians in the West Bank on the basis of their ethnicity, I am confident you will no longer be mystified by Desmond Tutu's description of it as Apartheid.