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Published on Monday, March 22, 2010 by Al-Jazeera-English
Besieged Gaza Denied Water
Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip has brought immense sufferings to Palestinians living in the coastal territory.
The siege even impedes the supply of water, the most basic need for human survival.
Now - 80 per cent of Gazans lack access to clean water.
The head of Gaza's water authority says he has plans and the means to import water from other countries until self-dependency is reached, but Israel's blockade is the only thing in the way.
Al Jazeera's Casey Kauffman reports from Gaza.
© 2010 Al-Jazeera-English
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6 Comments so far
Show All.....will any jews find irony in their Passover celebration of god's vengance on the land of oppression?
I'm sure apologists for the US/Israel ethnic cleansing policy will come up with some justification for restricting Gazans from having access to clean water, perhaps because the water can be used to make spitballs.
To preempt apologists' comments on CD of the US/Israel policy of ethnic cleansing Palestinians, I'll post the following so I don't need to respond to their comments.
Apologists' tactics in regards to the US/Israel policy of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians:
1 – Attack the messenger (CD poster or whoever criticizes the US/Israel's ethnic cleansing)
2 – If the critic is a Jew, call the Jew anti-semetic or a self-hating Jew
3 – Make it sound like Israel is the victim although Israel is the aggressor and occupier
4 – Point to other injustices in the world to deflect attention of Israel's illegal acts.
5 – State that Jews and Palestinians have a long history of conflict therefore the situation is unresolvable (ignoring Israel's illegal occupation) in order to maintain status quo and further Israel's expansion of illegal settlements
6 – Claim Israel has biblical rights to Palestinian land (thus God supports the ethnic cleansing)
7 – Claim the occupied territory was either no man's land or another countries land to justify Israel's illegal confiscation of the land and the people on it.
8 – Defend the occupation and ethnic cleansing without mentioning the illegal acts: land confiscation, house demolitions and evictions, burning and razing of Palestinian farmland, illegal land annexations, specific apartheid policies in the West Bank, shooting and arrests of non-violent demonstrators on occupied land, restriction of movement, land and sea blockade, restrictions of imports of medicine, food, school supplies and building materials, illegal shooting of Gazan farmers and fishermen...
9 – Make so illegitimate arguments or use inaccurate/misleading facts to justify Israel's illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing policy that it is impossible to respond to them all because every time you try, another illegitimate argument is made. (The Bush administration was a master of this in the buildup to the Iraq war. It seemed every week, another piece of unsupported evidence was made to support attacking Iraq. And every time you challenged one illegitimate argument, the arguer (usually a Fox News viewer) would abandon that argument and jump to the next illegitimate argument and this would continue to the point of exhaustion.)
10 – Switch between tactics 1-9 above in your non-stop argument whenever one of the tactics runs out of steam.
11 – In regards to blogging, create discussion fights and go off topic.
12 – In regards to blogging, apologist is either ignorant or feigns ignorance and attempts to attack the credibility of the comment by asking for a link to the source (effort to waste time of blogger when information is readily available on the internet and the apologist doesn't provide support for his own misinformation). If you don't respond, e.g., because you don't monitor the site all day, apologist discounts your argument, and if you respond, the apologist changes the subject, makes a new attack, or ignores the response.
Apologists use tools such as Megaphone Desktop (www.giyus.org) to alert themselves when articles about Israel's destructive policies appear on the internet so they can use tactics like the above to try and win public opinion.
thank you progressive 101. I understand 1-12 but I didn't know about Magaphone Desktop. So that's how they do it! I often wondered how every so often, certain blatant opinions would come out of the woodwork.
I just finished watching "An American Radical," a documentary about scholar/activist for Palestinian rights, Norman Finkelstein. I came to realize a long time ago that, when you tell the truth as he does and are passionate about it, as he is, you will be taken down. People like Finkelstein are dangerous to the powers that be but they're a gift to We the People and it's high time we recognized that.
Israel has cut off electricity as well. Severely hampered access to hospitals and medical care. Blockaded and embargoed the harbors and waterfronts. Restricted food shipments. Routinely uses massive retaliation against civilian populations.
Israel is committing Crimes Against Humanity that amount to genocide.
Yet Israel is continually portrayed as the poor suffering victim in North American media.
Israel has become that which once tried to eradicate them. By their own actions they are feeding the anti-Semitism that is building against them.
The closest analogy I can come up with is a pyromaniac psychotic who is trapped in a burning building who continues to pour gasoline around himself.
I don't understand all these make-believe peace initiatives. It is plain enough to see that there will never be a peace and that the intent of Israel is to take over the whole of Palestine, whether that takes another 50 years or two hundred , that is the goal. (They are doing to the Palestinians what Americans did to the native Indians.) And they are doing it with the blessing of the US. If the US really wanted a peace agreement all they would have to do is stop their economic aid to Israel which amounts to about 10 million dollars per day.
Hear, hear! Thank you for putting the truth out there. Israel intends to take all of the land and how they rid the land of the Palestinians matters not a whit to most Israeli citizens. Can you say "genocide"?
When will the American citizenry wake up to this?