Arjan El Fassed
How many more Palestinians need to be killed before the world opens its eyes? How many more Palestinians need to suffer this horrendous price for freedom? How many more need to be punished by Israel for their existence - through imprisonment, killing, torture, expulsion, loss of property and freedom?
When does the world opens its eyes to see that this is all a campaign to exterminate Palestinians as a human presence on the land of their ancestors. To former Israeli Prime Minister Begin they were "two-legged vermin"; to MK Michael Eitan they were "drugged roaches in a bottle"; to former Israeli Prime Minister Shamir they were "grasshoppers"; to the more polite Israeli public they were "the Arabs of Judea and Samaria"; and to the New York Times they were simply "terrorists" or just "Arabs".
When does the world comes to see that the Palestinians are human beings who just want to continue their daily lives and that of their children on the land they inherited from their ancestors. Those who have been driven out by aggression or by fear thereof, just want to return home and live as human beings on the lands that were owned by their parents and grandparents.
Over the years of negotiations, what has been left out of media attention is the increasing Israeli intransigence and actual violence. This policy of persecution and discrimination is what Palestinians have contested and will contest. It is a fact of their lives, more than negotiating-rounds with US diplomats who are keener Zionists than the Israeli negotiators themselves.
The United States has been supplying the Israeli occupation forces with the bullets that have killed 12-year old Mohammad in the arms of his dad and have killed 18-months year old Rania. Palestinians, not only in Palestine, but also those who are living in exile, cannot register and attest to the suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The inside and outside has become one.
All illusions of improving the "quality of life" or in what Oslo became known as the "peace dividend" are inherently unrealistic and in direct contradiction to the aspirations of the Palestinians to live in freedom. The "quality" argument is just another attempt to "sugar-coat" the occupation for both world consumption and for local consumption as the means of making an abhorrent situation of oppression palatable to the oppressed.
Peace is not the outcome of an arbitrary "trial and error" policy, or the result of a negative, partial selection of incomplete components, which form only part of a total and coherent plan. A necessary prerequisite to any peace process is the commitment to clear and final objectives, namely, self-determination, freedom and return.
Since Oslo, Israel has succeeded in imposing, and getting, the PLO to sign an agreement defining 'peace' that rests on unconditional security for Israel but extremely conditional security for the Palestinians, both under occupation and in the diaspora.
Israeli abuses, if mentioned at all, are treated as "obstacles to peace" rather than human rights or international law violations. The scope and gravity of Israel's human rights violations is widely known, reported and documented. Its relentless efforts to legitimise blatantly illegal acts (to justify what cannot be justified) renders Israel's abuses unique.
Israel relies on its self-made laws to trample basic human rights - from sanctioning torture to taking hostages, from establishing and expanding Jewish colonies to demolishing homes, from deporting Palestinians and prevening millions to return home to deliberately discriminating against the Palestinian population in all matters relating to land expropriation, planning, and building and executes a racist policy against Palestinians who remained in the land they were born.
The US is imposing its own rules on a world that has had enough of imperialist and expansionist states. At a time when freedom and democracy have supposedly triumphed over authoritarian regimes, censorship and media manipulation are, paradoxically, making a comeback, more powerful than before. With no moral claim on any count, the US has been bombing and committed genocide in Iraq. In the Washington Times of December 13, 1995, war criminal Madeline Albright, openly called the UN "a tool of American foreign policy". Now Washington has abandoned the UN altogether and is mediating a deal between an occupation and its patron to serve its interests in the region.
Palestinians would need shoes the size of the earth in order to kick this world in the pants - this world that insists that victim and executioner are equal; this world which goes to extremes in its cruelty toward the victim and its sympathy for the executioner in asking the victim to please exercise self-restraint and control his reactions. The US has a mean attitude that cannot be disputed, even meaner are those who demand that we keep quiet and give this US cooked peace yet another chance.