‘The Iron Wall’, a documentary about Israeli settlements, will be shown tonight at 7.30pm in the Cargill lecture theatre. It is being hosted by the Lincoln group of Amnesty International, a human rights organisation.
The hour-long film was directed by Mohammed Alatar, and looks at the construction of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories, as well as the ‘security fence’, as the Israelis call it, being constructed between Israel and the West Bank.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, says that Israel “has stolen [huge amounts] of land from the Palestinians,” and that “hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians” now live on this land.
The film came out in 2006, four years after the Israeli government began construction on the barrier. B’Tselem calls it “the most extreme solution that causes the greatest harm to the local population.”
John Dugard, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said in 2003 that “the time has come to condemn the wall as an unlawful act of annexation.”
Despite this, the Israeli defence ministry calls it “an important obstacle to [deter] terrorist organisations.”
Related links
The Iron Wall official page
Amnesty International UK
George Washington on Israel:
“A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.” – George Washington in his Farewell Address
“The nation which indulges toward another habitual hatred or habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interests.” – George Washington
“Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.” – Thomas Jefferson