Avskaffa Israel?

"Since 1967, we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people," he says in "Yoman Masa," ("Diary of a Journey"), which he filmed by himself, with a hand-held video camera, in the West Bank and Gaza over the last two and a half years.

He speaks to settlers, Palestinians and soldiers. While Israel is planning to pull its 9,000 settlers out of Gaza this summer, Mr. Yavin sees no end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, where more than 230,000 Israelis live beyond the 1967 boundary lines, plus another 200,000 or so in East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel after that lightning war in which he fought.

Talking of the missed chances of many governments, both Labor and Likud, to end or reduce the steady occupation of the West Bank, Mr. Yavin says astringently, "This merrymaking will never be stopped."

His own employer, the state Channel 1, which Mr. Yavin helped to found and where he had also been director of television news, chose early on not to televise the documentary. So Mr. Yavin, who has his own company, sold it to Channel 2, a commercial channel. Its licenseholder, Telad, has lost the franchise to another group, and beginning Tuesday night, for five weeks, it will run Mr. Yavin's cri de coeur as a kind of goodbye to Israeli television.

In an interview in the dim cafeteria of Channel 1, Mr. Yavin, tall and genial, says he sympathizes with the settlers, but his portrait of them and the security network to protect them is harsh. He describes a woman giving birth while waiting at a checkpoint and tells a settler, "It's not Jewish, what we're doing there."

Most of Israel’s investigations of civilian casualties have been a sham. The government’s failure to investigate the deaths of innocent civilians has created an atmosphere that encourages soldiers to think they can literally get away with murder.
Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director for the Middle East & North Africa division

Incidents in which Israeli forces have killed Westerners are investigated more frequently than the deaths of Palestinian civilians. This is partly because the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli government are highly sensitive to the media impact of such killings. It is also because the victims’ families have greater access to financial, media, and technical resources. But even investigations into the deaths of prominent foreign victims show clearly how the IDF’s delays, equivocation, and lack of transparency result in investigations that fall badly short of the “effective remedy” required by international law.

But Atef Salib, an official with the foundation Habibi Ana, a gay café for immigrants in the city centre, has not noticed rising aggression. "You have good and bad people, but it is known that homosexuality is difficult to harmonise with the Arab mentality."

Juden Sharon är den som ligger bakom allt elände i regionen.