Biography

Having said that, it remains that a large number of Israeli and Western Jews are quite unhappy about the way Palestinians are treated by the government of Israel, and empathize with them publicly. Besides, an increasing number of Israelis, including military personnel, have taken courageous public stands against their own government by refusing to serve in the West Bank or Gaza and were harshly punished. They take such a stand because they see ahead of the politicians and realize that Israel’s future is in the Middle East. After all, the original roots of the Jewish people are in the Middle East, not in Eastern or Western Europe. They say it themselves and have designed their history and the whole concept of aliya (i.e. return of the Jews to Zion, the Promised Land, or Israel) around this fact.

Members of the long-time active joint Israeli-Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement see the inhumanity with which the system treats the Palestinians and they immediately express their opposition.³¹ Many, like young American peace activist Rachel Corrie, have been killed or injured on purpose, or accidentally, for their activism to prevent the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinians from continuing. Others have not been deterred by Israeli heavy-handedness and continue to resist. But, like in so many other countries, the Israeli population just wants to live without problems, so they refrain from rocking the boat and let the politicians who have their own multiple agendas run the show unchallenged.

The overall situation between Israel and the Palestinian native population is quite reminiscent of that existing between cowboys and Indians in the American Far West of yesteryears. The Israeli establishment and the settlers who are supported by the government of Israel as well as by international donors are taking on the role of cowboys, and continue to hound the Palestinians into submission, exclusion, suffocation, and death by psychological asphyxiation. As a first step they would like to relegate them to “Indian reserves” like those in North America before expelling them en masse towards the neighbouring Arab countries at the first opportunity, or at least by instalments as has been happening so far.

In addition to that, understanding the psychology of their enemy, the Israelis, particularly the unruly fundamentalist extremists, incite the Palestinians every now and then to commit an insignificant attack against the Jews. They do that by staging an attack, or by conducting a "visit" to a contentious religious site. This enflames the Palestinians who react, and that draws an Israeli military retaliation against Palestinian population centres in "self-defence". Unfortunately, the Palestinians continue to be manipulated by the Israelis in this elementary fashion. The rockets fired from Gaza against some ill-defined targets across the border inside Israel constitute an example.

Israel's singular advantages³²

In its fight against “local terrorism” Israel has several advantages:

1. It is present in the Palestinian “territories”, the main breeding grounds of terrorism according to the Israelis, and the national resistance to Israeli control of their lives according to the Palestinians.
   
2. Israel controls most of the land, all borders, air space, coastal waters, all water resources, agriculture, and any kind of building in those “territories”.
3. The Israeli military enter areas controlled by both the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and by Hamas in Gaza at any time they consider it necessary for the security of Israel, which includes targeted assassinations; home demolition in certain areas; and home confiscation in others.
4. Israel’s close proximity to the occupied territories has enabled it to make use of a variety of its intelligence capabilities.
5. Israel indirectly encourages the Palestinians, or actively creates the atmosphere for them to erupt and conduct attacks or launch homemade rockets against Israeli targets to further justify depopulating the Palestinians territories and maintain the high moral ground of “we are fighting a war against terrorism”. Since the First Zionist Congress, which was held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897 the final objective without any deviation has always been the same: take the land away from the Palestinians bit by bit cowboy-Indians style, and prohibit them from ever setting foot there again.

On the ground today there is nothing but a continuation of the same old problem since 1917. On one side, the Israeli establishment uses all the tricks that imagination can invent to seize more Palestinian land without people on it, while on the other side the determined Palestinian population awkwardly attempts to hang on to its land and its existence, while reeling under its own questionable political and ideological power centres imposed on them. Whether secular or religious, these power centres have proven to be incompetent, irresponsible and devoid of any sense of accountability, irrespective of which officially sounding titles they have bestowed on themselves. What the Israelis do to the Palestinians is self-described as being part of God’s command (a mitzvah in Hebrew) to reclaim the Promised Land as they choose to believe, and the Palestinians justify their attacks on even innocent Israelis also as being God’s command to struggle (Jihad in Arabic) to liberate their homeland from foreign occupiers.

The reality remains that the history of Palestine is now part of the History of Israel, and vice-versa. Both people would gain by being interested in learning each other’s history the way it is and not the way they imagine it to be, or the way it is force-fed to them. Few, very few, do. Some think they know, others have already made up their mind without having a clue, and the majority simply does not care.

The above-stated analysis is meant to separate the wheat from the chaff, by calling things by their names in light of history and of the realities on the ground today, and not on the basis of ancient mythologies and popular tales.