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Source: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/where-israel-is-concerned-its-always-groundhog-day-31437414.html
Instant Amnesia When Israel Is Discussed
(Sunday Independent-Ireland) Israeli Ambassador Boaz Modai - It is 20 years since the signing of the second phase of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. Under this 1995 agreement, the most populated areas of Judea-Samaria [the West Bank], containing 96% of the Palestinian Arabs, are now under the autonomous government of the PA. It is often necessary to remind people of this fact when mantras like "Israeli-occupied West Bank" are recited. An uninformed person might think that Israel, one day last summer, inexplicably decided to launch an unprovoked assault on defenseless people in Gaza. In fact, 4,258 rockets and countless mortars fired by Hamas into Israel over 50 days plus 32 terror tunnels prepared for the massacre and abduction of Israeli civilians were met with Israeli air strikes targeting rocket launch sites and Hamas infrastructure, plus a limited ground invasion to destroy the tunnels. Those who wish to demonize my country find it easy to get a platform in the media to speak of "genocide." Has amnesia progressed so far that some people have forgotten the meaning of a word like "genocide"? One-third of the world's Jews wiped out in the Holocaust - that was genocide. Palestinian Arabs, on the contrary, enjoy the highest life expectancy and the lowest infant mortality in the Arab world. When they did live under Israeli occupation, the number of their universities increased from one to nine; and the diseases of polio, tetanus, whooping cough and measles were eradicated.