Thursday, December 6, 2012

My letter to the LATimes 12-4-12 RE Israel takes a harder line: Withholding tax revenue and planning for new housing follow the U.N. vote on the status of the Palestinians.


RE LATimes Editorial Israel takes a harder line: Withholding tax revenue and planning for new housing follow the U.N. vote on the status of the Palestinians.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-e1-israeli-settlement-20121204,0,1913186.story

Dear Editor,

Israel has been making these same bad choices no matter what- with both war and with peace they have been misappropriating Palestinian resources as well as investing in Jewish housing projects and land grabbing "security walls" created to harass and impoverish the native non-Jewish people of historic Palestine.

The first hard line was and remains an obstinate and myopic refusal to respect the Palestinian refugees' inalienable legal and natural right to return to original homes and lands.  That hard line has helped Israel continue to usurp Palestinian land and rights on an individual level as well as a national level for more than six decades.

A fully secular two state solution firmly based on full respect for international law and basic human rights is the best way forward.  It was then, and is now the only way to stop cynics and extremists and bigots on both sides from pulling the entire region into even more violence and despair. 

Sincerely,
Anne Selden Annab

NOTES
Re: Proposed [ defense spending bill] Amendments to Cut Palestinian Funding Discarded

Israel, Palestinians escalate settlement showdown

The E1 emergency

UN tells Israel to let in nuclear inspectors

Jimmy Carter in USA Today "The path to peace in the Middle East has always been difficult, but never impossible."

The American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) today urged the Obama administration to use all its good offices with Israel to ensure that settlement expansion reportedly being considered in the highly sensitive “E1 corridor" not take place.

U.S. State Department condemns Israeli Settlements

Has Israel's settlement expansion crossed a 'red line'?

Ultimately Armed Struggle ... a poem

In northern Mali, music silenced as Islamists drive out artists

Culture in the Cross Hairs



The Golden Rule... Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

The Arab Peace Initiative


"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world." Eleanor Roosevelt

The Office of International Religious Freedom ( http://www.state.gov/j/drl/irf/)   Given the U.S. commitment to religious freedom, and to the international covenants that guarantee it as the inalienable right of every human being, the United States seeks to:
Promote freedom of religion and conscience throughout the world as a fundamental human right and as a source of stability for all countries

".... it being clearly understood that nothing
          shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious
          rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine..."

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