UN debates West Bank settlements
27/9/08
The Palestinian president and Arab countries have criticised Israel over its settlement expansion policy in the West Bank during debates at the United Nations. In a speech to the General Assembly on Friday, Mahmoud Abbas deplored as “racial terrorism” what he said were daily attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians, and urged the international community to take action. “[The settlements] will not allow for the emergence of a viable Palestinian state because they divide the West Bank into at least four cantons,” he said. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, whose country formally called for the debate, said Israel must halt settlement activity and obey international law. “Settlement makes the creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible,” he said. “The only path to Israel’s security is peace and it is time for Israel to understand that it cannot continue to exempt itself from behaving in accordance to international law,” Prince Saud said.
See: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2008/09/ 200892620542726273.html
Leftist prof.: Bomb at my home shows settler violence spilling over Green Line
Jonathan Lis, 27/9/08
Professor Zeev Sternhell on Friday said the pipe bomb attack at his home late Wednesday, believed by police to have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists, was a sign that settler violence was spilling over the Green Line into Israel proper. The left-wing activist and Haaretz columnist told Israel Radio that “there are two populations in the [Palestinian] territories and there are two systems of law, and if settlers are allowed to beat Palestinians, to uproot their orchards and demolish their houses - why shouldn’t this happen across the Green Line?” The Green Line demarcates Israel’s border with the West Bank as it lay before the 1967 Six-Day War. Sternhell, an Israel Prize laureate, was lightly injured when a pipe bomb exploded outside his home in Jerusalem, in what police suspect could be a new campaign by right-wing extremists to target prominent left-wingers.
See: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1024632.html