{"id":368214,"date":"2018-07-06T01:41:56","date_gmt":"2018-07-06T00:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/why-does-palestine-matter\/"},"modified":"2018-07-06T01:41:56","modified_gmt":"2018-07-06T00:41:56","slug":"why-does-palestine-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/why-does-palestine-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Does Palestine Matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_103135\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-103135\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/06\/9740576146_fdaa1c3bb2_k.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"397\" srcset=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/06\/9740576146_fdaa1c3bb2_k.jpg 510w, https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/06\/9740576146_fdaa1c3bb2_k-300x234.jpg 300w, https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/06\/9740576146_fdaa1c3bb2_k-768x598.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 510px) 100vw, 510px\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by young shanahan | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Why does Palestine matter? It\u2019s a question I ask myself nearly every day. Another way to put it is, \u201cIs the devotion of major attention to the plight of the Palestinians an obsession worthy of suspicion or an appropriate response to a grave historic and continuing injustice?<\/p>\n<p>No one will be surprised when I reply that major attention is an appropriate response. Palestine matters and should matter. I will try to explain why.<\/p>\n<p>First, perhaps most basically, the sheer cruelty \u2014 the scope of the violation of human, i.e., natural individual, rights \u2014 of Israel\u2019s treatment of the Palestinians warrants the concern of all who favor freedom and other (classical) liberal values: justice, social cooperation, free exchange, and peace.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s start with the Occupied Palestinian Territories. As B\u2019Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.btselem.org\/\">says<\/a> front and center on its website: \u201cIsrael\u2019s regime of occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations.\u201d No one who sheds the blinders of the Official Narrative can help but feel pain over the institutional barriers to normal life, not to mention the literal destruction of life, that are regular features of Israel\u2019s rule in the West Bank (with nearly 3 million Palestinians), East Jerusalem (over 300,000), and Gaza Strip (nearly 2 million). It is no exaggeration to describe the system as an instance of apartheid, which is the word used by&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/07\/05\/why-does-palestine-matter\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo by young shanahan | CC BY 2.0 Why does Palestine matter? It\u2019s a question I ask myself nearly every day. Another way to put it is, \u201cIs the devotion of major attention to the plight of the Palestinians an obsession worthy of suspicion or an appropriate response to a grave historic and continuing injustice? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-368214","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}