Monday, June 04, 2007

40 Year Anniversaries: Sgt. Pepper's, Israeli Occupation

The last few days I've been hearing and reading a lot about the 40th annniversary of the release (June 1, 1967) of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. And now we are starting to hear, and read, about another 40th anniversary--of the start of the so-called Six-Day War (Arabs prefer to call it the June War), on June 5, 1967. I've not been monitoring that closely, but thus far, my sense is that, as usual, media accounts focus on the Israeli viewpoint, and fail to note that tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of 40 years of occupation of the West Bank (or, at least, much of it). Will anyone in the mainstream media, I wonder, pay any attention to the new Amnesty International report, "Enduring Occupation: Palestinian under Siege in the West Bank," which documents the ongoing and awful effects of the occupation: the apartheid wall, the expansion of illegal settlements, the enclavization of Palestinian Bantustans, the destruction of homes and crops, the destruction of the Palestinian economy, the blockades, and so on? (Kneejerk forecast: I doubt it!)

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