Without Intervention, the Conflict is Set to Grow in 2007 Even Exceeding Earlier Violence
BBSNews 2006-12-14 -- There are still echos in the media over Jimmy Carter's new book that uses the term apartheid in its title to describe the reality in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel. Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and also the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam commented today:
"President Jimmy Carter is hardly the first to refer to Israel's policies against the Palestinians as ‘apartheid.’ President Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a host of other South Africans have long recognized the applicability of the term to Palestinians. And the UN passed the 1973 International Covenant against the ‘crime of apartheid’ specifically to ensure that those policies of discrimination and denial of rights of one group to suppress another group were not limited to southern Africa, but would be illegal anywhere in the world. But Carter's book has brought the issue to the center of US political discourse, and is challenging the long-standing refusal of so many powerful government, media and academic voices in the US to examine seriously the US role in enabling Israel's continuing violations of international law."
Mouin Rabbani, a senior Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group and a contributing editor of Middle East Report, from Jordan recently commented:
"The policies pursued toward this conflict by the international community have produced unprecedented hardship for the Palestinian people, an explosive impasse between Hamas and its Palestinian rivals, prolonged Israeli-Palestinian deadlock and impunity for Israel in the Occupied Territories. Left unaddressed, this combination of factors is likely to lead to a renewed escalation of the conflict in 2007, one that may well exceed the bitterest periods of the confrontation that erupted in late 2000."
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