As this program goes out to broadcast in early April 2018, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have embarked on what they call the "Great March of Return". In their thousands they walk toward the electric fence that has kept 2 million Gaza residents penned in for more than a decade. They plan to sit in a tent-city, until Nakba day, on May 15. That day marks the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, or âcatastropheâ â when the marchers, their parents or their grandparents, were forced to flee their homes upon the creation of the state of Israel.
Israeli soldiers killed 17 Palestinians and wounded more than 1,500 others in the first few days. Analysts on US media such as Democracy Now, as well as noted Israeli journalists call the country an Apartheid state.
The same analysis had been made just a month earlier by Dr. Virginia Tilley. She spoke on March 2 ,2018, at the National Press Club in Washington DC at the annual conference organized by the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
â¨The theme of the conference was: The Israel Lobby And American Policy. Speakers such as human rights attorney Noura Erakat, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and many others explored the different ways in which a powerful Lobby for Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, steers the flow of donations, foreign aid and weapons to Israel. They also warned that the Israel Lobby might succeed again in causing the US to launch a war against Israel's perceived enemies in the Middle East.
Dr. Virginia Tilley is professor of political science at Southern Illinois University. She has conducted research in Central America, Israel-Palestine, post-apartheid South Africa, and Oceana. Dr. Tilley is also the co-author, with Prof. Richard Falk, of a 2017 report commissioned by the U.N.âs Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia titled âIsraeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid.â
Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
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