Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (4)

By Jimmy Carter
The Israeli Apartheid - part 1

The Israeli Apartheid - part 2

(During Carter's and his wife's Rosalynn's regular visits to the Middle East in the first ten years after leaving the White House)
There was a unanimous complaint among Palestinian political leaders and others that the worst and most persis­tent case of abuse was in Hebron, about twenty miles south of Jerusalem, where the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are buried. About 450 extremely militant Jews have moved into the heart of the ancient part of the city, pro­tected by several thousand Israeli troops.

The division of the center of Hebron in 1997. The green zone is Israeli and the yellow zone is Palestinian. 99.7% of the population is Palestinian.

Heavily armed, these settlers attempt to drive the Palestinians away from the holy sites, often beating those they consider to be "tres­passers," expanding their area by confiscating adjacent homes, and deliberately creating physical confrontations. When this occurs, the troops impose long curfews on the 150,000 Palestinian citizens of Hebron, prohibiting them from leaving their own homes to go to school or shops or to participate in the normal life of an urban community. The Palestinians claimed that the undisguised purpose of the ha­rassment was to drive non-Jews from the area. The United Nations reported that more than 150 Israeli checkpoints had been established in and around the city.

... any manufactured goods or farm products were not permitted to be sold in Is­rael if they competed with Israeli produce, so any surplus had to be given away, dumped, or exported to Jordan. The fruit, flowers, and perishable vegetables of the more activist families were often held at the Allenby Bridge until they spoiled, and in some areas the farmers were not permitted to replace fruit trees that died in their orchards. Their most an­guished complaints were about many thousands of ancient olive trees that were being cut down by the Israelis. Access to water was a persistent issue. Each Israeli settler uses five times as much water as a Palestinian neighbor, who must pay four times as much per gallon. They showed us photographs of Israeli swimming pools adjacent to Palestinian villages where drinking water had to be hauled in on tanker trucks and dispensed by the bucketful. Most of the hilltop settle­ments are on small areas of land, so untreated sewage is dis­charged into the surrounding fields and villages.
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, page 120-121.

Since 1980, with the Likud Party in control of the government, the taking of Arab land had been greatly accelerated, and the building of Jewish set­tlements in the West Bank had become one of the govern­ment's top priorities. Benvenisti [Meron Benvenisti, former Israeli deputy mayor of Jerusalem, who was devoting his full time to a definitive analysis of Israel's policies in the occupied territories] added that the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank had been previously limited but that new policies and present trends meant that the fur­ther annexation of substantial occupied areas was probably a foregone conclusion.
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, page 125.

To be continued...
Pictures, maps and titles in this article are not from the book "Peace Not Apartheid".