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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rrufff who wrote (581268)	6/8/2004 6:07:29 PM
From: exdaytrader76	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

The Palestinian terrorists, OTOH, purposely target civilians with only minimal prospects of hitting military targets. They kill as many Israelites as they can with the means that are available to them. Military targets are just better protected. They would love to blow up a bus full of soldiers, too, but that is much harder. Israel is not without blame. They kill plenty of civilians, too. I don't see this conflict as pure good vs evil. The palestinian state is coming, though. They are reproducing faster than the Jews in the region. The average palestinian woman has something like nine kids. In ten years, they will either have a palestinian state or they will have to set up an apartheid system where a minority rules a majority. And being poor is no excuse to be a murderer, but maybe if their lives did not suck so badly, they would have less of an urge to leave this world. globalpolicy.org Palestinians 'Sink Into Extreme Poverty' By Stephen Cviic, BBC January 29, 2003 The charity Christian Aid has published a report describing what it calls the situation of extreme poverty into which most Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are sinking. It says almost three-quarters of the population are living on less than $2 a day and one-quarter of all children are anaemic. Christian Aid says Israel's military occupation is mainly responsible for the crisis and called on Western countries to put pressure on Israel to withdraw to the positions it held before September 2000. The growth of acute poverty among the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has as much impact on their daily lives as the violence which grabs the international headlines, it adds. Decades-long crisis Christian Aid gives examples of how the security situation is affecting the economy, saying that farmers are seeing their olive and citrus groves destroyed by Israeli tanks and bulldozers and traders are unable to move from village to village because of travel restrictions and curfews. The report also says long-term development work by outside organisations has become all but impossible in the current climate. Christian Aid places most of the blame squarely on the Israeli military occupation, which came about following the Palestinian uprising of September 2000. However it says the crisis has roots going back decades, in the loss of land suffered by Palestinian families, the building of Jewish settlements, and in the unequal distribution of water. Calls for sovereignty The charity also accuses the Palestinian Authority of corruption, inefficiency and of failing to tackle poverty. Christian Aid sees little chance of an improvement in the situation unless Israel is persuaded to withdraw its forces to the positions they held before the uprising. It has called for the Palestinian Authority to be given sovereignty over its own areas, and for the establishment of a forum to allocate water rights more equitably. The problem is that these are exactly the measures that can only come about once meaningful peace talks begin - and there is little sign of that at present.