Reply To Bill Hahn
How can you write that Israel created a democratic state in the Middle East?
The founding of the state of Israel was based on the forced ethnic cleansing of many of the original residents of Palestine....some hundreds of thousands were forced out at the point of a gun or terrorised into leaving.
Their land was stolen and continues to be stolen.Palestinian villages were erased and their fields,olive groves and farms bulldozed.Thousands of Palestinian houses have been destroyed by Israeli armoured bulldozers and the whole of the occupied West Bnk is under lock down with an apartheid style wall separating Palestinians from their farms and preventing them moving freely to and from local towns and villages.
And of course Palestinians do not have the civil rights or human rights enjoyed by Israeli citizens.In effect they are third class non citizens in the land of their birth. Many Palestinian males have been imprisoned at one time or another and thousands are in prison at the time of writing.
Gaza itself is a starving open prison of around a million people with access and exits blocked by the Israeli military.
To call Israel a democracy flies in the face reality!
It is a settler colonial state with more in common with the apartheid state of South Africa.
ifor