From Ori Nir of Americans for Peace Now:
… If you want to see what the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians will turn into if we don’t start reversing the escalating status-quo of Israeli occupation in the West Bank, go to Hebron.
If you care about the future of Israel, if your political thinking is governed by a sense of what is feasible, what is right and what is moral, if Jewish values mean something to you, go to Hebron.
Talk to the settlers. Hear from them what their vision is. Talk to the Palestinians. Ask them about their daily lives. Ask them about the resentment, the hatred the despair and the sentiment of vengeance that the status quo is brewing in their hearts and minds. Talk to the soldiers, the red-beret paratroopers – Israel’s best fighters – who are stuck in this depressing place, their fighting skills reduced to checking shopping bags of old Palestinian women and trying to block teenage settlers from vandalizing Palestinian shops or hurling rocks at Hebron’s Arabs.
If I were Benjamin Netanyahu, I would go to Hebron before I go to Washington to meet with President Obama, before devising the “fresh approach” to Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking that he referred to at the AIPAC conference. …
Mr. Prime Minister, on your way to Washington, go to Hebron. Because the creeping Hebronization of Israel is cancerous. You know that. And you know it’s not too late to reverse it.
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