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Thursday, February 3, 2011

Anna Baltzer

Anna Baltzer is a Jewish-American Columbia graduate, former-Fulbright scholar, the granddaughter of Holocaust refugees, and an award-winning lecturer, author, and activist for Palestinian human rights. Anna Baltzer is a volunteer with the International Women's Peace Service in the West Bank and author of the book, “Witness in Palestine: Journal of a Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories”  (see: http://www.annainthemiddleeast.com/aboutanna.html  and http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6724.shtm).

Anna Baltzer on Apartheid Israel (2007): “if Israel desires control the territory that it has for more than two-thirds of its history, and to remain the state exclusively of the Jewish people, and to be democratic as well, it must find a way to create a Jewish majority on a strip of land in which the majority of inhabitants are not Jewish. There are only so many possible solutions: there's forced mass transfer (as was tried successfully in 1948, and is currently advocated by Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman), there's mass imprisonment (10,000 plus Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails as I write), there's genocide ... or there is apartheid. The more humane alternatives of Israel withdrawing to the 1967 borders or becoming a state of all citizens are not even on the bargaining table.Apartheid and segregation failed in South Africa and the United States and they will fail in Israel and Palestine. Ethnocentric nationalism failed in Nazi Germany and it will fail in Zionist Israel. But until they do, the Ibrahims and baby Khalids of Palestine are counting on you and me to do something, to say something, since they themselves cannot. Silence is complicity. We cannot wait for things to get worse. The ethnic cleansing and apartheid have gone on long enough..” [1].

[1]. Anna Baltzer, “The crime of being born Palestinian”, Electronic Intifada, 25 March 2007: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6724.shtm .

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