New year, renewed despair

While at the door step of 2016, yet another year of the same: no hope looms in sight for any change in the steady drift from bad to worse, from chaos to savage violence, from fragmentation to disintegration, from failed state to no state, a situation that repeats itself across the Arab world with rare exceptions.

For the Palestinian people the calendar does not start in January but in May.

On May 15, 1948, the British mandate in Palestine was officially terminated, paving the way for the rise of the state of Israel over the debris of Palestinian history and existence.

Any good reading of history would trace the roots of the current trouble — indeed decade after decade of war, instability, radicalisation, retardation, violence, terrorism, lawlessness, moral degeneration and social discord — to that historic moment.

The gross injustice to which the Palestinians were subjected to that year, by no less than the international body meant to protect them, rather than distort international law to deprive them of their land, their rights and their future, is primarily responsible for all the chaos prevailing in our region now.

It is also responsible, directly and indirectly, for the chronic regional instability and conflicts since.

What is so miserably unique about the Palestinian catastrophe, often linked to the year of their first dispossession, is that it kept compounded year after year.

The Palestinians were never left alone to tend to their wounds wherever they ended up in neighbouring countries, even out of their homes, even without their usurped rights and even in miserable living conditions.

Israeli forces chased and bombed those Palestinians who were forced out of their towns and villages in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

Israeli death squads chased Palestinian leaders around the world to assassinate them. 

The Palestinians were not expelled from home in one go. There were those who left in 1947 or 1948; there were those who were forced to leave again in 1967 when Israel attacked and occupied the West Bank of Jordan, including East Jerusalem, in addition to the Gaza Strip.

Many of those who left the West Bank in 1967 were already 1948 refugees living in refugee camps in the West Bank.

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were fair game for Israeli air force that routinely pounded them at will.

Real and deliberate massacres were either carried out directly by Israeli forces, or overseen by them against innocent, defenceless, Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla refugee camp in Beirut, in 1983 and in a UN shelter in Qana, in South Lebanon, in 1966, just to mention the most shocking examples.

From 1967 till 1970, the Palestinian refugee camps in the Jordan Valley were regularly attacked. In February 1968, the Israeli forces crossed the Jordan River, attacked refugee locations there with tanks and infantry, but the attack was repelled by the Jordanian army causing the invaders a humiliating defeat in the well-known battle of Al Karameh.

Neither were the Palestinians who remained under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza allowed to live in peace, even if they chose to do so.

Israeli practices continued to subject them to the most abnormal atrocities: routine aggression on their persons and their properties, displacement, house demolitions, arbitrary arrests, severe restrictions of their movement, destruction of their farms and crops, confiscation of their land to build illegal settlements and armed raids on their dwellings.

The Israeli goal has always been clear: to make life so difficult for the Palestinians so that they leave.

Israel wanted the land without the people. Systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has been a standard policy for Israel.

Israel has constantly blocked every effort, even when exerted by its best ally and protector, the US, to reach a settlement with the Palestinians, even on most favourable terms for the Israeli side, simply because it does not accept any less than the entire Palestine, preferably without Palestinians.

After 70 years of conflict and compounded injustice, we enter 2016 with the situation remaining the same: no hope, no political horizon and no sign of change on the Israeli side. 

Israelis continue to defy the simplest lessons of history, in addition to their open defiance of international law, insisting that the Palestinians should remain constantly under humiliating and suffocating occupation, if not under tight siege, as in Gaza, until they decide to leave.

The option of staying occupied is not on offer and has really never been.

Indeed, time and circumstances were not helpful to the Palestinians.

Their suffering is too hard for any people to sustain. But they are left no exit. That is why they started to fight with the simplest weapons available to them.

No amount of occupiers’ power will be enough to control rebellious people when they put their lives at definite risk the way the Palestinian young men and women are now doing.

Every Israeli measure so far to suppress Palestinian will to live in peace and with dignity has been countered with novel tactics.

That is likely to continue. And that is also the recipe for perpetual conflict.

The Palestinians’ lives could not become worse than they have been for decades. It is Israel that stands to lose.

One lesson of history has been forcing itself upon all of us, but not many seem to want to grasp it. It is this: in this region, either we all live in peace and secure, respectable lives or we all have to succumb to eternal war and suffering.

The latter has been Israel’s choice, no doubt.