Today is election day in South Africa, 20 years after the election in which Nelson Mandela became president and apartheid was effectively ended. It seems like the African National Congress will be re-elected to office despite the record of corruption of the party and its leader president Jacob Zuma, which is partly blamed for the voting apathy of the so-called ‘born frees’, young people who were born after end of apartheid and who can vote for the first time.
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One of the common misconceptions heavily promoted by successive Israeli governments and their lobby in the US is that Israel keeps making generous offers of peace towards the Palestinians but keeps getting rebuffed, and that this is the main hindrance to achieving peace. That this goes against all the facts has been repeatedly pointed out but it has become one of those zombie lies that is trotted out routinely and is reinforced by the western media to justify Israeli excesses, apartheid policies, and the steady and continuous encroachment of Palestinian lands by the expansion of settlements in the Occupied Territories.
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Max Blumenthal writes that although there have been many people who have been criticizing his book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel that takes a hard look at what Israeli society has become, they have been reluctant to share a stage with him and debate the issues.
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While the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict may have been viable at one time, most serious observers are now abandoning it because it is clear that it and the never-ending ‘peace-process’ seem to be merely stalling tactics for time as Israel increases its steady encroachment of Palestinian land.

So what might be the solution to this seemingly intractable problem?
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In the west and especially in the US, one of the least known elements of the story of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the ugly story of how the Palestinians were uprooted from their land and homes leading up to and through the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The heroic story of how the Jews, ‘a people without a land’ came to occupy ‘a land without a people’, was always based on a false premise. Palestine, far from being a largely unoccupied wasteland, was a bustling place, home to many people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia.
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