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Only resistance will address Palestinian rights: US activist

“Only resistance will address the injustices of [Israel] which targets the Palestinian people for removal from their land and from history,” Ralph Schoenman said.

The Palestinian people must continue their resistance and uprising against Israel in order to regain their freedom and human rights, an anti-war activist and author in California says.

“Only resistance will address the injustices of the ‘Zionist state’ which targets the Palestinian people for removal from their land and from history,” Ralph Schoenman told Press TV on Saturday.

The leader of the largest Jewish group in North America criticized Israel’s policies toward Palestinians as “misguided.”

“Asking Jews around the world only to wave the flag of Israel and to support even the most misguided policies of its leaders drives a wedge between the Jewish soul and the Jewish state. It is beyond counterproductive,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said in a speech Thursday night at the union’s biennial conference in the US city of Orlando, Florida.

“This expression of discomfort and hostility even on the part of traditional Jews who have supported Israel before, is a measure of the growing isolation and the weakness of the ‘Zionist state,’” Schoenman told Press TV on Saturday.

“Israel is alienating its own population even those who have not been critical before,” the author of “Hidden History of Zionism” added. “It’s the measure of the extent to which [Israel] is isolated.”

In his keynote speech, Rabbi Jacobs said the Jewish community must not remain silent when hate-crime attacks kill innocent Palestinians in the occupied territories.

He said that the reform movement “has long opposed Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank.”

Tensions have been running especially high since August when the Israeli regime imposed restrictions on the entry of some Palestinians into the al-Aqsa Mosque in East al-Quds (Jerusalem)--the third holiest site in Islam.

According to the latest figures by the Palestinian Health Ministry, at least 76 Palestinians, including 17 children, have lost their lives at the hands of Israeli forces since the beginning of October.

More than half a million Israelis live in over 120 illegal settlements built since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds in 1967.


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