Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 07:21:35 -0600 (MDT)
From: Muhammad Deeb <mdeeb-AT-gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: Lord Gilmour calls Jewish settlements in Gaza "affront to civilization"



Lord Gilmour calls Jewish settlements in Gaza "affront to civilization"


Mon, 14 May 2001

Lord Gilmour calls Jewish settlements in Gaza  "affront to civilization"

Occupied Jerusalem: 14 May, 2001 (IAP News) - Lord Gilmour, a former
British Foreign Secretary, has castigated the zionist occupation regime's
persecution of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as
being much worse than European colonialism in the nineteenth century.

Writing in the British newspaper, the Observers, on 13 May, Gilmour wrote
that Israel was tormenting the Palestinians in ways far exceeding any thing
done by 19th-century imperial powers.

"On the pretext of security,  the Israeli army is laying waste some of the
best Palestinian soil. I saw acres and acres of uprooted olive and fruit
trees, some of them in places where there could be no possible security
excuse.  Israel used to boast that they had made the desert bloom; now they
can boast they have turned previously blooming Palestinian land into a
desert," wrote Gilmour who recently toured the West Bank and Gaza.

He pointed out that the Israeli army was using excessive power to vanquish
Palestinians, eager to free themselves from decades old military
occupation.

"The Israeli army is able not only to destroy buildings and kill
Palestinian fighters and unarmed civilians in any quantities desirable, but
also to impose collective punishments and to make life intolerable for the
entire population."

Gilmour dismissed the so-called "Barak offers" made during the Camp David
talks last year as a myth.

He said Barak's "generosity involved derisory terms on Jerusalem and would
have kept most of Israel's major illegal settlements in place, turning the
areas assigned to the Palestinians into a series of mini-Bantustans, and
making the resulting Palestinian state unviable.

"Had Nelson Mandela accepted such an offer from apartheid South Africa, he
would have been reviled as a traitor. And if Yasser Arafat  had accepted
the Camp David offer, he would have been similarly execrated."

Gilmour castigated Israeli settlement policy, especially in the Gaza Strip.

"Israel's illegal settlements on the West Bank are bad enough, but the ones
in the Gaza Strip are an affront to civilization. I very much doubt if
there is, even in the murkiest annals of nineteenth-century colonialism, a
remotely comparable instance of imperial arrogance and contemptuous regard
for the rights of subject people."

Gilmour pointed out that Israel was behaving without any regard to
international law, arguing that without international pressure on Israel,
the shameful humiliation of Palestinians will continue.

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