PROMINENT left-wing Israeli academic and author Tanya Reinhart plans to quit as emeritus professor at Tel Aviv University in protest against her Government's handling of the Palestinian issue.
Professor Reinhart, who will give a public lecture at the University of Melbourne tomorrow night, said Israel's walling of the large and prosperous West Bank was cutting off the Palestinian people from their lands and each other.
She said she could no longer live in Israel while it did what she said was the first attempt in history to imprison a nation with a wall that cut off villages from their farmland.
"Palestinians should not have to pay the price of the Holocaust," she said.
"It seems that it has been forgotten that this is a simple and classical conflict over Palestinian land and resources that Israel has been occupying since 1967." She said the recent attacks on Lebanon were similarly unjustified and that Israel used the capture of their soldier, Gilad Shalit, as a pretext for war with Hezbollah. But the war had been planned for some time and was based on a vision of Israel that extended into southern Lebanon.
"Lebanese know that (1948 prime minister David) Ben-Gurion's vision for the state of Israel was based on the Litani as the natural northern border of Israel," she said. "Everything they did suggested they have never given up the idea of the Litani."
She said Israeli people would never defend taking land from Lebanon but the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier was used by the Government as a failed pretext for attempting to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon.
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