Israel continues to perpetuate its crime on the name of security, and the international governments continue to keep their hands behind their backs. The Jewish state uses the presence of Hamas in the region as an excuse to commit anti human actions; starving and killing thousands Gazans including children, elderly and women. After the Hamas’ takeover of Gaza in 2005, Israel imposed a blockade on the region allowing only a few basic humanitarian suppliers into the ship, ‘Israel Allow fresh food but not canned food, frozen meat but not fresh one etc’. According to the World Health Organization, one third of children under five and pregnant women are anemic. In addition to that, the food distribution has been suspended several times since June 2007 as a result of border closures letting the most fragile dying from hunger. Stopping food from reaching the region to wipe out the Gaza’s population was not enough. Israel wants to make the life of Palestinians in Gaza unbearable, depriving then from all their rights. Indeed Building materials such as cement, concrete and wood were nearly always refused entry, which strongly weakened the region’s expansion and affected its economy, which reached bottom in 2008, with 40% employment. Nineteen months after the blockade of the strip, Israel launched an offensive attack on Hamas. Israel said that the attack was made to destroy or reduce Hamas as a fighting force and to capture its stocks of weapons but ended up by killing more than 1,000 civilians including children, ‘as bombing were taking place at school time’ according to medical sources. Gaza also suffered extensive damage of housing and business’ UN FAO estimates a $180m of damage to the agricultural sector’. Twenty two days after the attack, Israel declared ceasefire claiming its victory against Hamas but the Islamic Resistance Movement did not agree on that, saying that Israel has already violated the ceasefire several times.
Obama the vain joy for the Muslim and Arab world
Mr. Obama visited Cairo soon after his election delivering a speech and reaching out to Muslims around the world. The US president began demanding that Israel stops its settlement activity in the occupied West Bank including in East Jerusalem, giving million of Arabs hope for justice and freedom. But that did not last long. Indeed, a year later, Mr. Obama appeared to accept only partial restrictions on the settlement growth, which angered the Palestinians who were in total disillusion and despair.
Israel has powerful people behind
Neither Obama alone, nor a ‘Watchman’ is able to urge Israel for peace.
The Jewish state seems to have strong people behind the scenes; Aipac, one of the most powerful pro-Israel lobby groups in the US, said that recent US statements were a matter of ‘serious concern’ – and the US should ‘ take immediate steps to soften the tension’ – in other words, it should back off. On this extreme argument, I would say that this is evidence of the reason why the Goldstone report on Israeli genocide in Gaza issues a year ago, has yet to see the light.
The conflict that never ends
The basic problem was that the maximum Israel offered was less than the minimum the Palestinians could accept.
Israel offered the Gaza Strip a large part of the West Bank, plus extra land from the Negev desert while keeping major settlement blocks and most of the East Jerusalem. It proposed Islamic guardianship of key sites in the Old City of Jerusalem and contributions to a fund for Palestinian refugees.
The Palestinians, who wanted to start with a reversion to the lines of 1967, offered the Israelis rights over the Jewish quarter of the Old City and wanted recognition of the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees.
Peace hopes blown over with Arafat’s death
In the 40 years since the Middle East war of June 1967, there have been many peace plans and many negotiations but most of them if not all have failed. Why negotiate, when you are strong enough to simply get whatever you want by yourself? If you look at past events and analyse them you might notice that Israel never truly wanted to negotiate when there was a chance to do so. In 1993, The PLO leader Yasser Arafat finally agreed on the recognition of the Israeli state ‘in his letter to Yitzhak Rabin Yasser Arafat stated: The PLO recognises the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security’ but asked for a withdrawal of the Israeli troops from the West Bank and Gaza, a request that has been ignored. Seven years later, another peaceful talk took place between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat to speed up the withdrawal but the negotiation failed for the second time when Barak said that he would not commit to a subsequent government with what he called the “ideas” coming out of the talks.
After the death of Arafat, Hamas and other Palestinian rejectionist groups, who took over the Palestinian authority, were unfortunately less open for negotiation. It is to say that Israel has missed its last chance of negotiating a long-term peace with Palestine. But let’s hope for the best and say only time will tell..
