"Here you have Palestinians that have no input whatsoever in the policies that are made. They are not in the city council; they are not in any of the decision making bodies in the West Bank or Gaza, there are certainly not in the government. The polices are made in order to insure Israeli control… so the law is designed in a way, in a very cynical way, to prevent Palestinians from building, and to keep them confined in little islands, so that most of the land of the occupied territories are free for Israeli settlements. (Jeff Halper, Israeli Committee against Home Demolition)
These are armed settlements, about a hundred and ninety of them, spread all over the west bank. (Richard Falk, UN Human Rights Fact Finding Commission)
Settlements are strategically built colonies of Israel that are connected by a network of roads which separate each Palestinian community from the next and confine their ability to expand. They are often constructed around the best farm land and water resources. (Documentary Narrator - Occupation 101)
They are surrounded by barb wire, they are armed inside… settlement residents are required to be armed by the Israeli military, and they are defended from the outside by the Israeli military itself.
The purpose of these settlements today, number one, is to continue the Israeli control and domination of the occupied territories. (Allegra Pacheco, Israeli human rights lawyer)
And the bottom line in all of this is to make Palestinians leave their country, it’s a very hard term, I know, but in a sense it’s a kind of ethnic cleansing. (Jeff Halper, Israeli Committee against Home Demolition)
The Israeli government and the Israeli army is not dealing with people as equals, that’s the main problem, that Palestinians are not considered, not perceived as equal to Israelis. (Yael Stien, B’tsalem- Israeli Human Rights Group)
There is no specific discrimination against Palestinian Christians as opposed to Palestinian Muslims, it’s a shared suffering (Douglas Dicks, Catholic Relief Services)
Christians see themselves very much part of the Palestinian national and they identify with the Palestinian people as being their people. (Father Drew Christiansen, United States Catholic Conference)
Palestinian Christians have difficulty getting to churches on Sunday mornings if they want to come to Jerusalem, Because, they don’t have that legal right from the Israeli’s to come to Jerusalem for worship. (Douglas Dicks, Catholic Relief Services)"
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