Shireen Abu Akleh, a highly regarded and respected journalist who reported on human rights abuses in the occupied territories was assassinated while covering an Israeli raid on the West Bank. Within a blink of an eye the Israeli Government went straight into the statutory “it wasn’t us gov” mode. Then the back tracking started after the international outrage, when a senior military official said, “At this stage, we cannot determine by whose fire she was harmed, and we regret her death. One Israeli official used the term that she was armed with a camera, WTF. All this after Israeli authorities blamed Palestinian gunmen for her death. The scenes at the funeral were beyond belief when Israeli police intruded the funeral beating mourners with sticks and then attacking the pallbearers to a point where her coffin almost fell to the ground. A better strategy would have been simply to keep the officers as far away as possible. Even Anthony Blinken the ultimate unflappable diplomat tweeted “We were deeply troubled by the images of Israeli police intruding into the funeral procession of Palestinian American Shireen Abu Akleh. Every family deserves to lay their loved ones to rest in a dignified and unimpeded manner.
If this is the height of the outrage that Blinken can muster, there is nothing more to be said.
Only as recently as last April the New York Times reported that Israeli forces forcibly entered the Al Aqsa Mosque where worshippers were praying on the first day of Ramadan, to cut loudspeaker cables. This was to stop the broadcasting of prayers which would interfere with a speech being delivered at the Western Wall by the Israeli President on Memorial Day. This was the precursor to the start of a full-blown confrontation between Israel and Hamas, engineered by Netanyahu.
Firstly, let me remind you that The Gaza Strip is 130 square miles which is the home in the sense of a refugee or internment camp to over 2 million Palestinians. It is one of the most densely populated places on earth where the subjugation, humiliation and brutal treatment of the Palestinian people has been going on for decades.
The conflict escalated in early May 21 with the launching of missiles into Israel, by Hamas the brutal Israeli retaliation has been caricatured as “tit for tat”. Israel’s Iron Dome missile system destroyed almost 100 % of the Hamas missiles while Israeli air strikes in the first 8 days resulted in 132 buildings destroyed, 2500 Palestinians made homeless and 200 Palestinians killed, of which many were children. The buildings include their only Covid test Lab, Associated Press HQ, schools, hospitals, sewage works and other infrastructure, cost $300 million. I do not excuse Hamas for the 12 Israelis killed by their rockets and the half dozen or so buildings damaged, but you can see it is not exactly “tit for tat”. A cessation of violence was brokered by Egypt on the 21st of May.
Just let’s go back a bit and recount; Israel, a Jewish State created in 1948 because of the huge empathy for a people whose treatment under the Nazis Final Solution represented the greatest ever crime against humanity. The creation of the state also fulfilled the Balfour Declaration that a Jewish homeland would be established in a divided Palestine. The UN in 1948 voted to divide Palestine to create two states, the Arabs voted against, the Brits left and Jewish leaders declared the creation of the new state of Israel. The resulting sectarian conflict is unfortunately one of Britain’s historical legacies. It led to 100, s of thousands of Palestinians being expelled and scattered across Jordan and other Arab countries. Properties were confiscated and given to migrating Jews from Europe. This has continued with the illegal annexation of the West Bank and now through eviction of Palestinians from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem. Today, all of this would be described as ethnic cleansing. I suppose this is what you get when you use the Bible as your local land registry. The Oslo Accord in 1993, otherwise known as land for peace was signed by Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and brokered by Bill Clinton was the recognition of the right to self-determination on the path to a viable Palestinian State for the West Bank and Gaza. What went wrong? The people who took the joint political risks for peace, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish right-wing extremist on the day a rally was held in support of the Accord at the Kings of Israel Square and Arafat died of medical complications in France. Ongoing negotiations failed and then later killed off by the settler movement supported by Netanyahu.
The most recent and ultimate betrayal for the Palestinian people came from their own side when the authoritarian regimes of Bahrain, the UAE which includes Dubai and Abu Dubai normalised diplomatic relations with Israel. This will be the pre cursor to the authoritarian, execution loving and misogynistic Saudi’s doing the same. All of this done to secure Israeli arms, surveillance technology to big brother their societies and to create a Suni, Israeli anti-Iran coalition. Bottom line for the Palestinian people is that you have now been screwed by your Arab brothers. This is not to ignore the failures and corruption of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank who continue to undermine their people by cancelling elections and the religious zealots that control Gaza.
The conundrum that still baffles me is, what is to fear from a two-state solution?. The answer should be nothing. Israel has the largest and the most formidable armed forces in the middle east, a nuclear deterrent, a bunch of failed states on its borders and the cream on the cake is the unwavering support from the US. So, again, what’s to fear from a two-state solution where Israel’s security will be assured irrespective of the rantings of Hamas and Iran and will allow Palestinian families to plan a future for their children, something that has been denied to them for decades.
Let us know what you think in the comments section 👇
Suneil Sharma
May 22
The Gob 
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