A Happy New Millenium

Palestine, and the PNA official website, wish all our readers and visitors a happy new year, century, and millenium.

The universally celebrated turn of the 20th century has been felt and perceived in Palestine with maybe more acuity than in other places: to begin with because it is in Palestine that this count has started, and the festivities in Bethlehem - and the Bethlehem 2000 program as a whole - are a good remainder that the message of Peace and Love has sprung from Palestine.

The turn of the year, however, has been a particular moment in the life of our people for now 34 years. For it is on the first of January 1965 that the Fatah movement launched, simultaneously, the armed action to bring Palestine back on the map of the area, the popular upheaval in the refugee camps that gave power to the Palestinian Resistance, and the political struggle to create the conditions that would allow mutual recognition and peace negotiations. So that every new year marks another year of our people's unending struggle for freedom, and for a just and therefore lasting peace.

But it is also that the Palestinian people, year after year, have been waiting and hoping for better days. Waiting and hoping, and struggling, and striving. For Peace, and for justice. And still they do not, for the most, despair. The century just elapsed has been, amongst many other things, the century of self-determination for the nations and peoples of the world. People long held in bondage by Empires achieved, throughout this century, that which only a happy few among the nations of the world had already achieved in the nineteenth century: national independence, statehood and sovereignty. But our Palestinian Arab people, in spite of the universal recognition of its inalienable rights, in spite of the immensity of the sacrifices it has consented on the path of a just and lasting peace, is still struggling, still hoping, and still waiting to join at last, as a subject of its own history, the community of free nations.

Let us hope that the realization of our people's right to Self-Determination and Return, and to the establishment of its independent state with Holy Jerusalem as its capital, a realization which the past century has failed to witness, will be the first achievement of the millenium, of the century, of the year that now begins. Because only this realization will make peace, our supreme objective, a state of civilization in our region, for the benefit of all its peoples.

In this respect, we rejoice - quite contrarily to what some media try to impress - at the perspective of an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement. For it will establish crucial precedents: dismantling settlements, and cancelling annexation of territory. It will also remove the last danger zone for Israel's security, and suppress the ultimate basis and alibi for the continued organization and institutionalization of the Israeli "sense of insecurity". Last, but not least, it will integrate both Syria and Lebanon into the global efforts to achieve stability, peace and prosperity for all in our region as a whole.

And to those who hope - or fear - that progress on the Syrian and Lebanese tracks will necessarily be detrimental to the Palestinians, we recall that the Palestinian issue remains the core and heart of the Israeli-Arab dispute. Without justice and peace in Palestine, without justice and peace in Jerusalem, treaties may regulate relations between states, but will not engender reconciliation between the peoples, will not strike roots in the depth of our societies.

This is why, while wishing you a happy new year in a better world for all, we offer you an updated report and file about Israeli settlement activities and policies in the occupied Palestinian territory, the most serious and damaging threat to the ongoing peace process. More than ever, settlement colonialism is a regressive anachronism in a world which requires cooperation in development, not brutal dispossession, coexistence and mutual respect, and not confrontation and racist hatred. Every house built within the framework of this segregationist design is a nail in the coffin of peace. The world must convey this message loud and clear to the ears of the Israeli government and the latter must stop playing around with the lure of settlement blocs as a ground to claim annexation of Palestinian territory.

The children of this new century deserve to live in real peace. All the children of the world, and all the children of our area. Let us all work together for this vision of a world reconciled, where, according to the word of the Prophet, "swords shall be turned into ploughshares, and they shall study war no more".

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