Palestine Continues to Bleed
By Nayyer Ali MD
The Middle East has been plagued by a series of wars ever since George W. Bush launched his adventure along the Euphrates in 2003 when he invaded Iraq under false pretenses. Since then there has been an insurgency and a civil war in Iraq, a devastating civil war in Syria that has killed half a million and displaced almost 10 million people, and a civil war in Yemen that continues to hammer the people of that poor nation. In the chaos of the Syrian civil war, ISIS created a base in western Syria from which they seized most of Sunni Iraq, and were only expelled after almost 3 years of fighting. Lost in all this mayhem has been the ongoing devastation and subjugation of the Palestinians.
In the 1930’s several hundred thousand European Jews came to Palestine under the sponsorship of the colonizing British, in order to create a Jewish state. This was done with total disregard of the 1 million Palestinians already living there, who had no desire to let these immigrants take their country from them. By 1948, the British, who were being harassed by armed Jewish groups, some of which engaged in terrorism, had enough and decided to leave. Instead of allowing the people living there to decide their own fate, a UN Commission voted in favor of a partition plan that gave the Jews, who made up 30% of the population, over 50% of the land. In fact, several hundred thousand Palestinians were living in the land that was supposed to become Israel. The Palestinians rejected this idea, wanting a single nation, but it was moot as Palestine descended into civil war. The much better organized and armed Jewish groups seized 77% of Palestine, with Egypt holding on to a small strip in Gaza, and Jordan taking control of the West Bank. For the Palestinians, they suffered a massive catastrophe, as 700,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from the lands seized by Zionist forces. These refugees ended up in massive camps in Gaza and the West Bank, where they have languished ever since, and have grown to several million in number.
Their hope from the beginning was to return to their homes and farms like all civilian refugees are entitled to do after a war ends. But Israel refused that despite a UN Resolution recognizing the right of the refugees to return to their homes. Instead, Israel confiscated all of their land and homes and private property and gave it to Jews who were coming to Israel.
Over the next 70 years the Palestinians have fought to recover what they lost, a loss compounded in 1967 when Israel seized Gaza and the West Bank in the Six Day War. That turned the Palestinians into an occupied people, with no human rights. They are subject to the whims of the Israelis, who can arrest them, detain them, torture them, shoot them, kill them, confiscate their land and property, exile them, and deny them any human right they wish to do so as long as they claim to the Israeli courts such actions are “necessary”. Israel will strike Palestinians with tank fire or airstrikes in civilian areas if they want to.
In 1993 the Israelis offered a possibility of a settlement of the conflict by entering into the Oslo Agreement with the PLO. This gave the Palestinians some partial self-rule, with the idea that a final peace agreement could be achieved. But Israel has never had any interest in an equitable peace. They only offer the Palestinians scraps and postage stamp bits and pieces of land while they insist on settling the West Bank and carving up the land to their benefit. No Israeli government has ever offered a fully sovereign and equal Palestinian state with a full withdrawal to the 1967 borders, and the current Prime Minister is opposed to any Palestinian state ever. Instead, he only wants eternal subjugation and a master-slave relationship with the Palestinian people. What he really wants is to make life so miserable for the Palestinians that they would leave and emigrate anywhere else on the planet that will take them in.
It is this backdrop that explains the violence in Gaza. Gaza is essentially an open-air prison run by Israel. The people living there are trapped, their only airport and seaport remain shut by Israel. The Israelis remain sovereign over them and have not offered even Gaza independence much less the West Bank. Over a million Palestinians are crowded into a few square miles. The people of Gaza have taken to protesting their captivity by attempting to cross the wall into Israel and literally walk back to the homes they or their parents once lived in. Israel sees Palestinians not as human beings with a right to live where they came from, but as a mortal threat to be shot. Which is why Israeli snipers engaged in target practice against civilians and inflicted hundreds of casualties. Israel claims the right to shoot civilians if they try to return to the villages they came from.
There are only two morally acceptable solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Either Israel gives all the people it has sovereignty over, which means the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, citizenship and full equality as human beings with the same value and the same inherent rights as Jews have, or it withdraws entirely from the West Bank and Gaza, removes its half a million settlers, and allow the Palestinians to have a fully equal and sovereign state of their own. All of the Arab states have even offered to recognize Israel and end the conflict if it were to return to the 1967 borders and give the Palestinians their freedom. This offer has been on the table for 15 years, and no Israeli government has ever shown the slightest interest, because Israel is not interested in peace, it wants to colonize all of Palestine and would love to find some way to get the Palestinians to leave.
Israel holds all the cards. It has dominant military power and the full backing of the US. With the rise of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry in the Middle East, the Arab states are more focused on Iran than on helping the Palestinians, who have been forgotten in all this. The only way this conflict will end in the near term is if a US President decides to end it. Only with massive American pressure will Israel agree to an equitable peace with the Palestinians. Until then, another generation of Palestine will suffer occupation and subjugation. In the long run though, the Palestinians will be the majority of the population between the Jordan River and the sea, and a rising Muslim world will develop the economic, diplomatic, and military capacity to force a change. This is probably 30-50 years in the future.
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