“Since the establishment of the State of Israel, not a single new Arab settlement has been established, with the exception of permanent housing projects for Bedouins in the Negev.”

However, these resettlement projects have been quite controversial and have generally been carried out against the will of the Bedouin population. From http://www.jstor.org/stable/2537634 (Israeli State Policy toward Bedouin Sedentarization in the Negev by
Ghazi Falah, 1989):

“Unlike many other Middle Eastern bedouin communities, the Negev
bedouin were already fully sedentarized when the Israeli government began to implement its settlement programs. Thus, these programs were not aimed primarily at settling a previously highly mobile population; rather, the objective was to evict this population from its lands and to resettle it elsewhere. Involuntary resettlement and forced migration have become a characteristic of Israeli government policy toward the bedouin, even when the final results appear to have been voluntary.”

A recent Economist article about the Bedouin in Israel is http://www.economist.com/node/21536645.

I think you might want to compare the growth in land area and infrastructure versus growth in population for Jewish and non-Jewish communities in Israel before trying to sweep everything under the carpet by the bland statement “almost every Arab town mentioned in the above link the town has grown both in population and size including the creation of facilities.” See for example page 28 of “Overlooking Nazareth: the ethnography of exclusion in Galilee” by Dan Rabinowitz (preview on Google Books at http://books.google.com/books?id=0xX6UfsmO-EC&pg=PA28&lpg=PA28&dq=nazareth%5C+1948+dunams&source=bl&ots=wv4Iwuoep9&sig=90uL0GPxuuRIxEL2mwkMR1gzRpw&hl=en&ei=NIjCTsTFIs-UtweUz_m0DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=nazareth%201948%20dunams&f=false.

So, what are you doing to improve civil rights country you live in, besides using it as way to deflect attention from what Israel is doing?

We can toss words around here all day, but if you were to see what is happening on the ground both inside Israel and in the West Bank (I have not personally been to Gaza) I believe you would see clearly that the level of systematic discrimination goes way beyond gated communities and the urban/suburban growth disparities of the (post-civil rights era) United States. It is clear to me that the state and local government, the police, and the courts all respond to the needs of elite Jewish citizens in one way, to those of non-elite Jewish citizens in another way, and to those of Palestinian citizens in yet another way, with little pretense of equality outside of hasbara for external consumption. The fact that all can vote (I am not speaking about the occupied territories at the moment) and have representation in the Knesset means little against these day-to-day realities.

The argument is easily regarded as polemic since both sides are arguing with their hearts, sincerely desperate not to associate the state of Israel with the terrible crime of specifically South African apartheid versus angst-ridden libertarian idealism seeking to end a humanitarian crises. And it is a crises.

The goal of this tribunal, if I understand its aims and not its politics, is to influence emotional intelligence to unblock whatever inhibits people from seeing truths that contradict their own present tense narrative of the world.

Message received. I will vote when there are elections and support or protest what and where I will.

However, whatever the goal of the Russel Tribunal, I believe the effect will not encourage peace but instead fuel anti-semitism and anti-Israel sentiment against people who cannot distinguish between the racist domination of white over black in S.A. apartheid and the struggle of half a century between the cornucopia of influences from all corners of the Jewish world (including a few Arab nations) and the people of OPT and Gaza.