Some facts you may not have known about Israel (the only democracy in the Middle East)

1. Non-Jewish Israelis cannot buy or lease land in Israel. A Jew from any country in the world is guaranteed citizenship in Israel, while the Palestinians who have been there for centuries are oppressed and persecuted.

2. Instead of sewing an insignia on clothing to distinguish race (like the Germans did to the Jews before WW2), Palestinian license plates in Israel are color coded to distinguish Jews from non-Jews.

3. East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights are all considered by the entire world community, including the United States and the United Nations, to be occupied territory and NOT part of the State of Israel.

4. Israel allots 85% of the water resources for Jews, and the remaining 15% is divided among all Palestinians in the territories? For example in Hebron, 85% of the water is set aside for about 400 Jewish settlers, while the remaining 15% is distributed among Hebron’s 120, 000 Palestinians.

5. The United States awards Israel $5 billion in aid each year from American tax dollars.

6. US aid to Israel ($1.8 billion annually in military aid alone) exceeds the aid the US grants to the entire African continent? This aid is used both to buy American weaponry and to buy arms made in Israel.

7. Israel is awaiting an additional $4 billion worth of American military hardware, including new F-16s and Apache and Blackhawk helicopters. As Israel’s main ally and supporter internationally, the United States is committed to maintaining the Jewish state’s “qualitative edge” in weapons over its neighbours.

8. The U.S. administration has notified Congress on numerous occasions that Israel has violated the rules on how US-supplied weapons are used? (In 1978, 1979 and 1982 during fighting in Lebanon, and once after Israel’s bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.)

9. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and bars international inspections from its sites.

10. High-ranking military officers in the Israeli Defence Forces have admitted publicly that unarmed prisoners of war have been summarily executed by the Israeli forces.

11. Israel blew up an American diplomatic facility in Egypt and attacked a US warship in international waters (the USS Liberty), killing 33 and wounding 177 American sailors and the US did nothing about it (Imagine if an Islamic country like Iraq did this)

12. Israel stands in defiance of over 70 United Nations Security Council Resolutions.

13. Israel is explicitly dedicated to the policy of maintaining a distinct Jewish character.

14. Israel’s ex-Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, was found by an Israeli court to be “personally and directly responsible” for the Sabra and Shatilla massacre in Lebanon where more than a thousand innocent Palestinian men, women, and children were axed to death or lined up and shot in cold blood.

15. On May 20, 1990, a group of unarmed Palestinian labourers were lined up and murdered by an Israeli solider as they sat waiting for transportation back to Gaza. The terrified labourers who gathered in an area of southern Israel known as Rishon Lezion (known to Palestinians by its Arabic name Oyon Qara) handed their ID cards to the Israeli soldier. The soldiers ordered the distressed labourers to kneel down and face the ground and unexpectedly showered them with a barrage of bullets, killing seven and wounding many others. Needless to say, the soldier was not charged with any crime.

16. Until as recently as 1988, Israelis were permitted to run “Jews Only” job ads?

17. The Israeli Foreign Ministry pays six US public relations firms to promote a “positive image” of Israel to the American public?

18. Ariel Sharon’s coalition government included a party–Molodet–which advocates ethnic cleansing by openly calling for the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from the occupied territories.

19. Recently-declassified documents indicate that David Ben-Gurion approved of the forced expulsion of Arabs from all Palestinian territory in 1948.

20. Former chief rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, who is also a founder and spiritual leader of the religious Shas party (Israel’s third largest political party) openly advocates a ‘Final Solution’ to annihilate the Palestinians? Speaking at the widely broadcast sermon marking the last Passover, he declared of the Palestinians: “The Lord shall return their deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world. It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”

21. Palestinian refugees make up the largest portion of the refugee population in the world.

22. Palestinian Christians are considered the “living stones” of Christianity because they are the direct descendants of the disciples of Jesus Christ-And the Palestinian Christians stand united with their Muslim brethren in the struggle against the Israeli occupation.

23. Despite a ban on torture by Israel’s High Court of Justice, torture has continued unabated by Shin Bet interrogators on Palestinian prisoners.

24. Despite every Israeli attempt to disrupt Palestinian education, Palestinians have the highest ratio of PhDs per capita in the world

25. The right of self-determination is guaranteed to every human being under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [December, 1948], yet Palestinians were/are expected to negotiate for this right under the Oslo Accords.

26. Despite what is widely perpetuated and written in the history books that the Arabs attacked Israel in the 1967 war, it was Israel who attacked the Arab countries first, capturing Jerusalem and the West Bank, and called the attack a pre-emptive strike.

27. As an occupying power, Israel has a particular responsibility under the Geneva Conventions to protect Palestinian civilians.

28. Zionists have been trying to destroy Masjid al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock for the last 50 years by digging underground tunnels beneath the sites to weaken its foundation causing it to collapse.

29. Nelson Mandela called the Israeli government an apartheid regime, just like South Africa used to be.