In an interview with the British Sunday Times, on June 15, 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir stated, “There was no such thing as Palestinians. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.” But much has changed since Golda Meir made her infamous statement in 1969, as Israeli leaders came to accept nearly 50 years after the establishment of the state of Israel in Palestine, that Palestinians do indeed exist.
Although such acknowledgment could be perceived as a strategic achievement of some sort, or at least a step in the right direction, the truth and reality are disturbing. Palestinians are recognized as a people, yet they are denied any rights that all people are entitled to; the policy of expulsion and elimination is still a dominant ideology, if not directly through Israeli political discourse, then through brutal actions against Palestinians on the ground.
It is through such twisted logic and deceptive claims that Israel has managed to survive as a notorious apartheid state, with one of the worst human rights records, while presenting itself to the world as the victim. And it is through such untruthfulness and shrewd propaganda that Israel has twisted the facts; the stateless and oppressed refugee fending for himself or herself with a rock and a slingshot has become the threat to the security of Israel, one of the most powerful nuclear powers and the possessor of the fourth most powerful army in the world.
The Palestinian struggle has been fueled throughout the years with the rightness of the Palestinian people’s cause and the legitimacy of their demands. And despite Israel’s political influence and reliance on the American vetoes at the UN’s Security Council, Palestinians have managed to win sufficient international legitimacy for their struggle. Dozens of resolutions have passed, despite the US’s efforts to block any attempt to indict Israel, affirming the “right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, national independence, sovereignty and right of return.”
But unfortunately none of these resolutions possesses a meaningful mechanism that allows the international community to take any action against Israel. Thanks to the United States’ endless support, Israel has proceeded unharmed and continues to take more provocative measures to ensure its suppression of the Palestinian population.
Immediately after its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel began building dozens of settlements in occupied areas in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Using billions of dollars of American aid, it succeeded in transferring, to this date, 220,000 Jewish settlers to these settlements. The expansion of settlements subsequently meant the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians, as more are losing their land at gunpoint every day, and as settlers aided by Israeli soldiers sweep the West Bank and parts of Gaza day and night with bulldozers and armed vehicles, cutting down trees, burning olive orchards and building more settlements.
Since the initiation of the peace process in Madrid in 1991, very little has changed on the ground. Unlike common belief, the peace process was by no means the peace of “the brave”; it was the peace of a crushed and betrayed nation, the Palestinians, vs. the mighty and arrogant victor, Israel. The UN and international law had little to do with the talks in Madrid. Palestinians were left on their own, negotiating with Israel who dictated to Palestinian delegates who is acceptable to talk with and who should be removed, what is the reference and the agenda of the talks, and almost every thing else.
Of course, the policy of Israel throughout these talks and following negotiations was the same abrasive and brutal policies used in the past; whenever Palestinian delegates refused to accept an Israeli term or condition, Israel would immediately strangle the Palestinian economy by locking both the West Bank and Gaza and or by going on a provocative settlement-building spree.
Palestinians were not only cornered by Israel and the lack of any balance of power, but also by the fact that the United States, the ultimate backer of Israel, led the talks after marginalizing the United Nations and related UN resolutions which were the only asset acquired by Palestinians at the time.
Yet elsewhere in Oslo, the Palestinian leadership, desperate for its survival, negotiated the infamous Oslo peace accord, which virtually legitimized the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories, receiving in exchange nothing but symbolic offerings, such as a flag and a police force. Although the Palestinian leadership argued at the time that Oslo was only a temporary stage aimed at achieving all denied Palestinian rights and the establishment of a state, reality on the ground shows the fallacy of such a claim.
Israeli settlements since the signing of Oslo in 1993 have doubled in number. Israel never ceased to claim more land and denied any Palestinian right in Jerusalem. At the time that the world hailed former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak as a peace maker, in one year under his administration, the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and Gaza increased by 13,000. Palestinians’ movement from Gaza to the West Bank, the West Bank to Gaza and even from one Palestinian town to another within the West Bank and Gaza was completely controlled by Israel.
Homes continue to be demolished, and settlers and army attacks against Palestinians continue to be staged. Palestinian orchards are routinely razed by Israeli bulldozers under various excuses; students were not allowed to cross safely to their schools and workers to their jobs; unemployment has risen to very high levels, at certain times reaching 70 percent in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian farmers are not allowed to export their produce, their only venue for profit, yet Israel shrewdly manages to sell its own produce to Arab countries with the label “grown in Palestine”; mothers lose their newborns in ambulances at Israeli check points, and others are shot dead on their farms, tortured to death in jail or beaten to death by settlers like in the case of 75-year-old Muhammad Al-Zalmut whose scull was crushed by settlers in the West Bank while harvesting his olives near the settlement of Ifrat near Nablus.
In a time when brutality, savagery and violation of human rights were regular practices, the so-called peace process was going nowhere. While Israel was granted much of its wishes, the primary concerns of Palestinians were left untouched; the right of return, borders, settlements, Israeli army withdrawal, a meaningful sovereignty. The most recent peace talks in Camp David in July 2000 was the last straw that provoked the current Palestinian uprising; the failure of the talks to meet Palestinians’ aspirations was a heartbreaking conclusion for years of endurance in the name of peace.
After five decades of savage occupation and numerous attempts to pacify the Palestinian problem politically, or through massacres and expulsion, the Palestinian uprising is a clear message to Israel that Palestinians’ quest for freedom is mightier than Israel’s nuclear weapons and powerful army. It is also a message to the Palestinian leadership that political compromises don’t have to be at the expense of a nation’s rights and integrity; and it’s a message to all nations, oppressed and oppressors, that freedom is not given. Freedom is taken.
