The world sleeps as Palestine is strangled

“The connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem cannot be denied. The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It’s our capital.”

You’d think Netanyahu could not have made made his position clearer in March this year when he spoke for the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but somehow the international community and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) gave the negotiators the benifit of the doubt when they hoped anything new would come out of the peace talks. No, Netanyahu doesn’t care if the international community and the International Court of Justice think the settlements are illegal. And no one is asking him the fate of the 500,000 Israelis already living in illegal settlements in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.

We are back to level zero once more. Mahmoud Abbas (Chairman of the PLO) is barely resisting the mounting Palestinian calls to end the peace talks altogether because of the settlement issue, and the Arab League has supported Abbtas’ decision to at least freeze them for the moment. It seems that the peacetalks have stalled for now. So what happens in the occupied territories and indeed in Gaza when nothing is happening at the negotiation table?
According to Haaretz a liberal Israeli newspaper, the Israeli settlement plan costs them $17 billion to maintain, which is a crippling amount for them. Israel had been building settlements throughout Palestine before the Six-Day War, they were building settlements throughout the occupied territories during the Oslo Accords and they are building settlements today.

So we all knew that, but what else is happening? Every passing day, every passing hour, when nothing is happening on this side of the wall, on every corner of the occupied territories thousands of Palestinians are being subjected to an increasing number of rules and regulations that are designed to turn their life into living hell. A “Bureaucracy of Evil”, as Ilan Pappe calls it, is feeding on the miseries of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories. The Nasser family living in East Jerusalem is a textbook example. Despite having ownership documents of their house dating back to 1924, they are faced with destruction orders from the Israeli forces and are refused access to electricity, water and roads. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything the Palestinian people do – the water they drink, how much ground they can dig for farming, simply crossing a check point – brings constant authorisation, regulation and subsequent harassment by the occupying forces. You simply can’t justify any of these measures by any rational security concerns.

What does all of this have to do with the current peace talks? It poses one simple question. Should the international community silently sit by waiting for the peace talks to bring a final solution to everything, while the situation in the West Bank and Gaza is worsened everyday? The fight for the liberation of the Palestinian people is not only fought on negotiation tables but on the streets of Ramallah, Hebron, al Bireh, East Jerusalem. It is fought by Palestinians in every other corner of the world. Perhaps it’s time we listened to what these people have to say…