If you want to be notified the next time I write something, sign up for FREE email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

(Image by Ben Heine)

When will the world reconsider the future options of resolving the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict? The lack of ‘peace-seeker’ leadership on Israeli sides makes a solution far away than any time in the past, yet, who is paying the price? People under occupation…

Quoting Hasan Abu Nimah:

Has the time not come to determine precisely and fairly where the chain of events starts, in order to be able to accordingly determine who retaliates for what? Should one not start with the occupation? Are 40 years of continued, severe, harsh, oppressive and humiliating occupation not aggression? Who gave Israel the right to occupy the Palestinians and rule their lives for that long, in full contravention of international law and the simplest principles of human rights? Who gave Israel the right to leave Gaza but lay siege to it, controlling every movement of people and goods to and from, and to seek European help to participate in controlling the siege? When the starved Palestinians dug tunnels to break their isolation, they were condemned and punished worldwide. Who gave the Israelis the right to impose total financial and political boycott as an act of punishment for all Palestinians for practising their democratic right and electing a government which Israel did not like, and the whole world went along with this additional injustice, tightening the boycott indefinitely?

1. Four decades of occupation

Zahi Khouri, (Source: San Diego Union-Tribune, via: IMEU)

“I don’t know what I would do if my daughter had to go through that humiliation.” A U.S. Congressman said those words to me while watching Qalandia checkpoint, the key Israeli roadblock between Occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. As we mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 War and Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory, his comment is particularly poignant. As both a Palestinian and an American, I wonder what my fellow Americans would do if they lived for 40 years with every aspect of their lives controlled by a foreign army, or what Congressmen would do if they had to pass through an occupier’s checkpoint on Capitol Hill…

Israel is the leading foreign destination for privately-sponsored congressional trips. Yet while the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is one of our most critical foreign policy issues, few Congresspeople visit the occupied Palestinian territories. I tell those who do that a trip through Qalandia checkpoint will show them most of what they need to know…

Israel’s military occupation similarly blocks the economic, political and social potential of Palestine. Like all people, when allowed to live in freedom, Palestinians have thrived. Economic development in the oil-rich Arabian Gulf countries was largely driven by Palestinians. Palestinian Americans are accomplished businesspeople, educators and artists. But in their homeland, the military occupation hems Palestinians in, limits their horizons and stifles their potential. Is this in Israel’s best interest?

American interests suffer too. Our credibility is damaged when Israel ignores U.S.-brokered agreements, yet remains the beneficiary of unparalleled American financial and diplomatic support. American peacemaking efforts are premised on the notion that a better future is possible, a future where both Palestinians and Israelis live in peace, freedom and dignity. On this anniversary of the 1967 War, the U.S. should fully engage and commit to winning the war of peace. The first step is for the occupation to end. Surely 40 years has been too long.

2. Why Not Celebrate a Different “Victory”…Peace
By Arab American Institute

With the 40th anniversary of the occupation approaching, Congress will likely make an unfortunate, if not unexpected, statement when it votes on a bill introduced by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos “congratulating the citizens of Israel” for their victory and the reunification of Jerusalem. It is almost beyond belief that Congress will choose to “hail” a victory that has brought nothing but misery and occupation to both Palestinians and Israelis rather than seize the opportunity to meaningfully rededicate itself to peace. Israel Policy Forum’s MJ Rosenberg, smartly observed: “The only people deeply offended will be those who live in the Arab world and Congress has rarely cared how their actions play in the Middle East-not even with 130,000 American troops over there. For Arabs and Muslims in general, the idea of the United States celebrating the Six Day War (and, by inference the occupation it produced)-when we don’t even commemorate our own wars except to memorialize the dead-will just be more evidence that the United States is abandoning the role of honest broker.”

3. 40 years of occupation
By Mazin Qumsiyeh

Those who planned the 1967 “six day war” (Al-Naksa in Arabic) 40 years ago and we the people who lived there could not foresee its ramifications on lives of Israelis and Palestinians let alone Americans and Iraqis today. I was a 10-year old kid growing up in the Shepherd’s field at the time the occupation began and my memories of the initial onslaught are vivid. After I immigrated to the US in 1979, I still go almost every year and still maintain residency there. I saw it get worse and worse every year from 1967 (and I dread my trip this summer). What can be said after 40 years of illegal occupation, after over 250,000 Israeli Jewish colonial settlers in the West Bank, after over 18,000 of our homes demolished, after causing massive economic dislocation (unemployment is at twice what it was for Americans during the Great depression), after over 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners now in Israeli jails, after over 10,000 fellow Palestinian civilians killed? What can be said after the remaining Palestinians are squeezed into shrinking ghettos after much of their best lands was confiscated? Should we focus on the price the occupiers also paid (especially since the introduction of the phenomenon of suicide bombings 10 years ago). Should we focus on the price the world has paid including the unfolding tragedy in Iraq (and now the Israel lobby is pushing for a war on Iran)? How about the over $1 trillion that Israel cost the US in these 40 years?

It was called a six day “war” because the Israeli aerial blitzkrieg so devastated the armies of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in the first few hours that the remainder of the time was basically what it took infantry to occupy the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights. Most analysts believe that this war was critical in cementing the Israel-US “strategic” relationship to a point of mutual dependency. But the survivors of the USS Liberty (A US Navy ship attacked by Israel in International waters on June 8, 1967) and all objective historians convincingly showed that: 1) Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty was deliberate, and 2) that the Israeli lobby was already strong before the war and thus managed to stifle an inquiry (for details see http://www.ussliberty.org/ ). President Carter suggested that there are individuals seeking to silence debate on these issues. He was ruthlessly attacked thus proving his point. Similarly, a research paper on the Israel lobby by renounced scholars Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) and Walt (from Harvard) was attacked in a way that proves its salient points. Thanks to the Internet, it is becoming more difficult to silence the truth. So even if this article is not published in a US mainstream newspaper, it will be read by tens of thousands anyway. So let us look openly at the legacy of 1967. (read more…)

4. For a Secular Democratic State
By Saree Makdisi (Source: The Nation)

This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Four decades of control established and maintained by force of arms–in defiance of international law, countless UN Security Council resolutions and, most recently, the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice in The Hague–have enabled Israel to impose its will on the occupied territories and, in effect, to remake them in its own image.

The result is a continuous political space now encompassing all of historic Palestine, albeit a space as sharply divided as the colonial world (”a world cut in two”) famously described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Indeed, Fanon’s 1961 classic still enables an analysis of Israel and the occupied territories as fresh, insightful and relevant in 2007 as the readings of Cape Town or Algiers that it made available when it was first published.

Israel maintains two separate road systems in the West Bank, for example: one for the territory’s immigrant population of Jewish settlers, one for its indigenous non-Jewish (i.e., Palestinian) population.

The roads designated for the Jewish settlers are well maintained, well lit, continuous and uninterrupted; they tie the network of Jewish “neighborhoods” and “settlements”–all of them in reality colonies forbidden by international law…

The wall that Israel has been constructing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2002 makes visible in concrete and barbed wire the outlines of the discriminatory regime that structures and defines everyday life in the occupied territories, separating Palestinian farmers from crops, patients from hospitals, students and teachers from schools and, increasingly, even parents from children…

…Given the circumstances, it is hardly any wonder that two-thirds of the Palestinian population has been reduced to absolute poverty (less than $2 a day), and that hundreds of thousands are now dependent for day-to-day survival on food handouts provided by international relief organizations. Not only has the international community refused to intervene; it has actively participated in the repression, imposing–for the first time in history–sanctions on a people living under military occupation, while the occupying and colonizing power goes on violating the international community’s own laws with total impunity. (read more…)

Enjoy this post? Get future updates sent to you for free! Join by email or RSS.