Dear CummingHome.com:

Civilian infrastructure targeted in Gaza.

Is it not astonishing that the entire world knows the name and face of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, while the hundreds of Palestinian children held in Israel's dungeons, not to mention 10,000 adult prisoners, thousands held without charge and trial, abducted from their homes in the middle of the night by Israeli occupation forces, remain nameless and faceless before a silent world?

Israel's daily massacres are ignored by the U.S mainstream press. Israel has become an apartheid pariah state, and its leaders are deluded in thinking that they can bludgeon the indigenous Palestinian population, who are now the majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, into submission and servitude. This invasion of Gaza is about Israel's relentless assault on the Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories, its expansion of colonies and settlements in the occupied West Bank. Israel announced annexation plan is all ignored.

Israel believes that it can hide the palestinians behind walls, in ghettos, as was done to Jews in Europe in the 1930s and ‘40s. The U.S media needs to report on the Israeli occupation, speak out against the apartheid laws inside Israel, not just in the West Bank. We Americans condemn the law that says that an Israeli citizen can marry anybody in the world, except a Palestinian, that an Israeli who marry a Palestinian has to leave the country. This is a new style of apartheid. It is even, as some have said, a new kind of Nuremberg law.

The Hamas leaders have said many times that they're willing to talk to Israel, they're willing to recognize Israel on the basis of reciprocity.

And that reciprocity is for Israel to end the military occupation on the Palestinian territories.

The problem is that Israel is still completely 100% committed to colonialism. That is why Israel is continuing to seize land in the West Bank, to build new settler colonies every day, to pave Jewish-only roads in the West Bank, to build the apartheid wall, to treat Gaza as a giant prison. The reason that Israel pulled its settlers out of Gaza is to create the fiction that Israel is not ruling over a Palestinian majority, exactly as South Africa created the Bantustans to try and fool the world into thinking that Blacks had their rights within these so-called independent homelands and didn't need to have rights within the South African state. The same trick will not work in Palestine, as it did not work in South Africa.

I challenge you to condemn these things and join the struggle to liberate not just Palestinians, but also Israelis, from this devastating system of oppression and apartheid.

Guillermo Kuhl

Cumming, GA