Walking miles in Palestinian feet

On one level one can understand Israel wishing to ensure its security and safety from terrorists. However, as we all know all too well, the extremes to which Israel has gone are absurd - and clearly designed to belittle the Palestinian / Arab population. All of this ignores the obscene conduct by the Israelis in Gaza and the West Bank.

Novelist Claire Messud visited Israel recently to attend a literary festival........not in itself anything out of the ordinary. But it became so, as she writes about in a piece in The Boston Globe:

"Some 20-odd writers from the world over - including the popular British travel writer and comedian Michael Palin; Sweden’s preeminent thriller writer Henning Mankell; and Canada’s Giller Prize-winning M.G. Vassanji - found our events at Jerusalem’s Palestine National Theater shut down by machine-gun toting Israeli soldiers in flak jackets. On the first evening, with a Gallic flourish, Jean-Paul Ghoneim of the French Consulate opened the French Cultural Center impromptu, and hosted our event on nominally French soil: we paraded through the streets in our party clothes, bearing trays of canapés and looking, I’m sure, very threatening indeed.

By the festival’s closing night, the British Consul General Richard Makepeace had made plans to welcome us at the British Council - which was fitting because the British Council was the festival’s primary sponsor".

Read this piece to get a feeling of, and insight into, what it must be like for Palestinians living under Israelis rule and domination. And the Isrealis wonder why there is no peace!

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