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“Since 1967 we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people that has a claim to this land,” said
Yavin.
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CAIRO, June 1, 2005 (IslamOnline.net)
– Israel is behaving like a brutal conqueror and occupier in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel's top television news anchorman said
in a documentary he filmed on Jewish settlements.
“I regard this as a Greek tragedy.
I don't see any solution,” Haim Yavin, a founder of Israel's
state-run Channel One and its news anchor for 37 years, told The
Guardian in an interview published on Wednesday, June 1.
“Since 1967 we have been brutal
conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people that has a claim to
this land,” Yavin said in his “Diary of a Journey” film which
was aired on Tuesday, May 31.
He not only questions the occupation
and the settlements, but the commitment of successive governments,
including Ariel Sharon's, to curbing Israel's hunger for land and the
expansion of its colonies, the British daily said.
“This merrymaking will never be
stopped,” Yavin maintained.
Commenting on the endless suffering
of the Palestinian people under the yoke of the Israeli occupation, he
said: “I cannot really do anything to relieve this misery, other
than to document it, so that neither I nor those like me will be able
to say that we saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing.”
The five-part documentary marked a
dramatic departure by the popularly known “Mr. TV” from a
decades-long policy of avoiding personal political commentary.
It is the result of his visits during
more than two years to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, carrying his
small camera.
He film was broadcast on a commercial
channel after Channel One turned it down.
Endangering Israel
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An Israeli peace activist is arrested by Israeli police during an Israeli-Palestinian protest against Israel's separation wall. (Reuters)
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Yavin further said that Jewish
settlers pose a threat to Israel.
“I have sympathy for the settlers,
but I think they are wrong and that they are endangering us,” he
said.
In the film, some settlers tell Yavin
that the Palestinians must be given a deadline to leave the occupied
territories or be forced out.
“Otherwise we should just bomb and
kill them,” says one woman.
The Council of Jewish Settlements in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip demanded the 72-year-old anchorman's
dismissal from state-owned Israel Television.
The international community and a
raft of UN resolutions regard as illegal all Jewish settlements built
on occupied Palestinian lands in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
The UN Commission on Human Rights on
April 14 condemned
Israel’s continued settlement building in the occupied Palestinian
territories.
Defying international resolutions,
Israel revealed on May 16, plans to build a section of its separation
wall to link the largest Maale Adumim settlement in the occupied West
Bank to Al-Quds (occupied East Jerusalem).
The controversial barrier has been
deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice and the UN
General Assembly adopted a resolution demanding Tel Aviv to tear it
down and compensate affected Palestinians.
"Horrors"
“My intention was to get the
personal feelings of the settlers, of the Palestinians,” Yavin told The
Guardian.
Among those filmed by Yavin is an
Israeli soldier in Al-Khalil (Hebron) who wonders how his compatriots
can remain silent in the face of the “horrors” the army commits,
and the settlers who ask him why he is not shooting Palestinian
children.
Israeli reservist Erlik Alhanan told
IslamOnline.net in 2004 that the number of Israeli reservists who
refuse to do their military service in the occupied Palestinian
territories was on the rise due to the illegal army practices.
Over the past four years, journalists
and world media outlets have joined a chorus of condemnation of the
Israeli aggressions on the Palestinians and the authoritarian policy
of suppressing freedom of speech and censoring media coverage.
Chief among journalists who
criticized Israel is the BBC's world news editor, Jonathan Baker, who
said Israel was prepared to take even stronger measures to conceal
what was happening in the occupied territories from the outside world.
Israel has further drawn a welter of
criticism for targeting journalists in the occupied territories.
In May 2003, award-wining British
journalist James Miller breathed his last after being shot in the neck
by Israeli troops in Rafah as he was filming demolition of Palestinian
houses Israeli bulldozers.
