Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

It is not surprising that Israel, having usurped the Palestinians’ land and expelled them, views their continued existence and resistance as an “existential threat”. More shocking are some recent Arab attitudes towards the Palestinians.

Following the fall of the Saddam regime in Iraq almost a decade ago, Palestinian refugees in Iraq became the target of anger, incitement and vengeance of demagogues, allegedly on the grounds that the deposed Iraqi president treated them well. Feeling totally exposed to blatant revenge with no state protection, many of them fled for their lives after living in Iraq for decades. A similar fate befell Palestinians in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion a decade earlier.

Could the same happen in Syria? The Palestinian refugees in Syria, about half-a-million, were the first to be accused of stirring unrest by one senior adviser of President Bashar Assad. There were obvious attempts to draw the Palestinians into the conflict to support the official Syrian narrative that the trouble was not a homegrown uprising, but rather an attack of foreign armed gangs acting as tools of foreign conspirators against Syrian stability and steadfastness. Some opposition groups tried, equally dubiously, to seize on specific incidents to claim that the Palestinian refugee population in Syria has risen up against the regime.

Few seem to understand that Palestinian refugees will have to live with whatever outcome transpires in Syria. As a population with no refuge or protection, Palestinians are safest remaining far outside the conflict.

Along the same lines, what is unfolding in Gaza is equally worrying. Besieged Gaza was the first to be blamed and instantly punished for the attack on a Sinai border police post which left 16 Egyptian soldiers dead late last week. The attack, deplorable and condemnable as it should be, was not the first of its kind, except for the larger number of deaths this time. In addition to the attacks on the soldiers, there have been numerous attacks on the pipeline carrying Egyptian gas to Israel and Jordan.

As a result of the restrictions placed by the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty on Egyptian military presence there, Sinai has been turned into a haven for extremist groups engaged in crime, smuggling and other illicit activities, including human trafficking.

The Egyptian people were rightly enraged by the loss of life and the lack of preparedness to meet the Sinai attack. But instead of demanding sober investigation followed by a strategy to address the issue and to restore state authority on all Sinai, some turned against the people of Gaza, accusing them of incubating terror and perpetrating the crime.

Much of the Egyptian media anger against their own state and their new president was not because the state had neglected the situation for so long, but because President Mohamed Morsi agreed to open the Rafah crossing (albeit briefly), ordered closed for years, again as a result of an Israeli demand. Morsi has been blamed for putting Palestinian interests ahead of Egypt’s.

The Egyptian response to the attack, sending the army back to Sinai to restore order and to put an end to the chaos, was correct. Hopefully that should not be a temporary measure undertaken with Israeli permission for dealing with this particular atrocity. Egyptian security forces should have freedom on all Egyptian land.

What is difficult to comprehend, though, is the punishment of all the population of Gaza for the mere suspicion that some or all the criminals came from Gaza — even though Gaza is tightly closed and Egypt’s Sinai is open on all sides.

Tightening the siege on Gaza by closing the Rafah crossing “permanently” and by destroying the tunnels is harsh, inhuman, irrational and legally wrong. Even if proven that all the criminals crossed from Gaza, only they and those who stood behind them should be punished. Collective punishment is something we associate with Israel’s crimes, not something the new Egypt should do.

The situation in Gaza is abnormal. It has been so since 1948. No serious attempt was ever made to address that oddity. Israel complained all along that Gaza produced commando groups, “fedayeen”, who infiltrated into Israel. Such allegations were used by Israel to justify its wars in 1956 and 1967, and its frequent bloody revenge attacks on civilians.

The narrow Gaza Strip, now with a population of 1.6 million, is among the most densely populated places on earth. Almost 80 per cent of the Gaza inhabitants are refugees who were forced out of other Palestinian towns and villages in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war which ended up with the loss of 78 per cent of Palestine to Zionist invaders.

The tunnels between Gaza and Egypt are only a symptom of the current problem. They exist because of the Israeli-imposed siege, which has literally driven much of Gaza’s commerce underground. At times, the tunnels were a real lifeline.

Everyone was silent about the tunnels out of hypocrisy, intimidation and fear of confronting the illegal siege and demanding its end. That is why the tunnels have been tolerated as an alternative. Now here are the consequences.

Israel’s diktat that Sinai should be left outside the authority of Egyptian security forces freed the large peninsula for armed groups. And Israel’s continued inhuman and illegal siege of Gaza has also created abnormal conditions with unforeseen consequences, such as the rise of extremist groups, arms smuggling and uncontrolled movement of people and goods open to all kinds of abuse.

Both Egypt and Israel have responded by addressing symptoms rather than root causes, therefore aggravating an already explosive situation.

The hundreds of tunnels were not dug because the people favoured them to regular and normal connection routes. They went underground to survive the siege. They will dig more if the destruction of existing tunnels is not immediately matched by providing the people under siege with legal and normal alternatives.

Yet, for all the changes in the region, the desperate situation of the Palestinians seemingly remains immune to positive change.

This year, the holy month of Ramadan arrived during the hot summer months of July and August, when fasting time exceeds 13 hours a day. With the weather hotter than usual, Ramadan evenings are always the right time for socialising, outings, family gatherings and serious group discussions.

One cool evening last week, I attended a post-iftar gathering in the garden of a northwest Amman residence. The idea was to conduct an informal conversation with Prime Minister Fayez Tarawneh who arrived with a number of his Cabinet members.

The main issues the prime minister chose to discuss were the recent Elections Law and Syria. He briefed the group on the government’s concerns with respect to Syria, the impact of the arrival of Syrian refugees, which adds to the financial strain on the budget, and possible border tensions in case the chaos in Syria spills over.

As expected, the prime minister, with support from his Cabinet companions, defended the Elections Law, which many guests criticised as divisive and not adequately representative.

Although each side was firm in presenting its arguments clearly and boldly, the debate was positive, mutually respectful, dignified and calm. However, it did not lead to any narrowing of the gap.

What was mentioned in passing towards the end of the lively four-hour session was the Palestinian issue and how much it has been ignored of late.

The remark was put in a negative context, hinting that this important issue is becoming a victim of the uprising in various Arab countries, and the disarray and upheaval is distracting attention from the central cause of Palestine.

Let me be frank. It is not as if the Arab states were doing very much to rescue Palestine; we can only look back on decades of accumulated failures.

One could say that by seeking to change stagnant systems, people are creating the conditions in which the Arab world could indeed finally mobilise its latent strength for the cause of Palestine.

The notion that Israel is benefitting from the existing turmoil in much of the Arab world is not uncommon, and in the short term, it may be true. Israel never wanted stable, democratic, prosperous and progressive Arab states around it. It always sought domination and superiority, something it can only be sure of if Arabs are weak.

Despite its history of massacres, occupation, colonisation and racism, Israel never stopped bragging about being the only stable “democracy” in the region.

Such parasitism on the misfortunes and tragedies of other nations has served Israel well until now, and however immoral it may seem, that is how international relations are often viewed and conducted. But that did not discourage our host from hurriedly putting on display his latest find in The Jerusalem Post that just proves how right this perception is.

He referred to a recent article by Barry Rubin, an analyst with a long history of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian positions, which claims that Israel emerges as a winner from the region’s chaos because many Arab countries around Israel will be so weakened by the developments within them that they would hardly be able to attack Israel.

The host alluded to Rubin’s conclusion that any future conflict in the region would not be with Israel but between Muslim Sunnis and Shiites. Many around the table gestured approval. Few did not.

Some questioned who Rubin was to take his words as the gospel.

Rubin writes that the new regimes in countries like Egypt and Syria will only refrain from attacking Israel because they would be “less able to do so effectively”, as if attacking Israel is otherwise a foregone conclusion.

Rubin does actually write that “the big Middle East conflict of the future is not the Arab-Israeli but the Sunni-Shiite one. But a series of conflicts have broken out all along the Sunni-Shiite borderland as the two blocs vie for control of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Bahrain”.

He then turns to the “surviving regimes, notably Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the five Gulf emirates”, which the writer says, “know the main threat to them is from Iran and revolutionary Islamists at home, not Israel. In fact, they realise Israel is a kind of protector for them since it is motivated and able to strike against those who also want to put their heads on the chopping block”.

That Israel and many of its supporters hold the belief that chaos around is a guarantee of stability for it could be understandable. This is an idea that has been nurtured and pushed from Israel’s Washington think tanks for years, including by the influential AIPAC group and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The problem is with many Arab intellectuals and analysts who implicitly or explicitly accept this faulty reasoning. By confusing the cause with the effect, they actually ignore decades of Israeli intransigence, aggression and creeping colonisation even when many “stable” Arab states were constantly grovelling and begging for negotiations.

Israel successfully picked off one Arab regime after another — starting with Egypt at Camp David — and felt comfortable that it could do as it wished, facing no greater challenge from the Arab world than the occasional empty Arab League statement.

Now, Israel is not so certain of the future. That is why many Israeli leaders lamented the departure of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, on whose authoritarian regime Israel had come to rely, and some now worry that the possible fall of President Bashar Assad in Syria will rob Israel of the stability and predictability that has allowed it to settle the Golan Heights with total impunity.

That is why in every country where there has been an uprising, outside powers are doing their best to restore the status quo in some form or another.

In the short term, attention is turned away from the cause of Palestine and Israel may take misguided comfort in that. But in the medium to long terms, truly democratic, sovereign and popular Arab regimes would be a development Israel would rightly view with great apprehension.

There is no contradiction between the struggle for Palestine and the struggle of Arab peoples for their rights. The latter is the necessary prerequisite for the former. The two complement each other.

Israel’s crooked strategy to pre-empt the standing claim of the Palestinian refugees to return to their original homeland from which they were ethnically cleansed 65 years ago, or accept just compensation in case they choose not to, is by no means new. Although the Palestinian refugees’ right of return is guaranteed by international law, Israeli leaders, since the creation of the state, have been pressing the claim that there are Jewish refugees as well, and that applies to those who left their property in most Arab states and migrated to Israel.

UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967, which still is basic for any possible settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, provided in paragraph 2 “for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem”. Because the resolution failed to specify which “refugee problem”, deliberately for certain — when the assumption has all along been that the reference was to the Palestinian refugees — Israel claimed that the reference also covered Jewish refugees.

The idea of exchanging refugee claims was so repeatedly pounded by Israeli propaganda and supportive media that many do believe that the Israeli claim should balance with that of the Palestinians’ and the refugee file should therefore be closed.

This poorly formulated equation makes neither political nor legal sense. While the Palestinian existence, land and people, were abolished by force and international complicity to make room for the creation of the Zionist state in 1947/48, the Jewish families who decided to migrate to Israel from various Arab countries soon afterwards did so out of their own will. What they left behind is private property. Their right to reclaim their property or even their abandoned citizenship should be respected by the relevant countries within the limits of the law that applies. As a matter of fact many Arab countries have repeatedly invited their Jewish citizens, who went to Israel in support of the Zionist project, to return to where they lived for centuries. It is politically impossible therefore to equate the two situations.

Neither does this Israeli attitude have any legal validity. The rights of Palestinian families that were forced to leave their homes, farms, land, businesses, history and factual existence cannot be denied on the grounds that Jews also lost property in other Arab countries. How can a Palestinian who lost property in Jaffa or Jerusalem benefit from Jewish property abandoned in Alexandria or Baghdad; and what kind of international justice would that serve?

Private property rights are entirely different from state rights. If an exchange of contested property can help settling state rights when the property involved is accurately estimated and valued, it does not apply to private rights, particularly where such settlements are envisaged in the total absence of the concerned owners of the said rights, and without their knowledge or consent. No state has the right or the authority to act on behalf of its citizens with respect to their property or private rights.

Apparently the trend in Israel recently is to expand its claim to include not only the property of Jews who left Arab countries six decades ago, but also the property that Jews owned in Arabia — now Saudi Arabia — since the time of the prophet 14 centuries ago. That sets extraordinary precedents that may require an endless process of revising the entire history of human kind to determine who owned what when, and who has a forgotten right across time to come forward and lay a claim to it.

According to a Middle East Monitor (MEM) report (December 30, 2011), Israel’s foreign ministry is preparing a draft bill that would enable the Zionist state to press claims for compensation for Jewish property in a number of Arab countries. The bill, which is divided into two parts is likely to be held back to be used during any negotiations addressing the issue of the Palestinian refugees and their right of return, says the report, adding further details indicating that the first part of the bill will demand that Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Bahrain pay compensation for the properties of 850,000 Jews, with an estimated value of $300 billion. The figures are based on the 1948 census of Jews from each country.

It is worth noting that the figure of 850,000 Jewish refugees exceeds the commonly mentioned number of the 750,000 Palestinians who were forced out of their land during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948.

The second part of the Israeli foreign ministry bill deals with Saudi Arabia. It intends to present the Saudi government with a compensation bill of more than $100 billion for Jewish properties in the kingdom since the time of Prophet Mohammad.

Iran will be pursued for compensation as well. The report says that compensation for the “alleged hundreds of dead and missing Iranian Jews in Iran whose fates are unknown will be set at $100m”.

That brings the total amount sought by Israel to just over $400 billion.

The MEM report further says that Israeli experts in international law, history and geography in the universities of Bar-Ilan, Beer Sheva, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa are working on this part of the claim. The Israeli foreign ministry is financing the project at an estimated cost of $100 million.

This cannot be realistic or serious. How could Israel deny the legally recognised rights of Palestinians who have been illegally separated from their land and homes by force only six decades ago while demanding compensation for 14 centuries-old Jewish rights that are impossible to support and define; and how could the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia be responsible for events that occurred centuries before it even existed.

Clearly such exaggerated claims are only meant to be threats to preempt and circumvent Palestinian legal rights, and will never work.

Israel has never been known to respect international law, which is only invoked if it serves its purposes. In this case it does not, but it can offer ground for argumentation and buying time.

It is indeed a pathetic and a bizarre strategy, which only reveals how desperate Israel has become in trying to bury others’ rights and to dig deep into history in search of a helpful argument. That, however, is not the only case in the protracted conflict.

Earlier this week, the Christian world celebrated Christmas. Some years ago, the Jordanian government had rightly decided to list Christmas day as an official holiday, recognising with due consideration the significance of the occasion as well as its cardinal religious meaning. The gesture further bonded the ideal relations that existed amongst Jordanian ethnic and religious communities.

Press reports have been describing the main celebrations at the Church of the Nativity in the occupied city of Bethlehem as they have been doing year after year. Also, Palestinian Christians, in particular, year after year, have been voicing their resentment of the bitter reality of an occupation that has been depriving the city and its population of basic freedoms for 44 years in a row, while the Christian world remains virtually silent. Except for some bleats now and then when Israeli illegal occupation practices exceed all tolerable limits, European powers’ relations with Israel are hardly affected.

The cruel reality is that we also, in the Arab world, got used to living with the occupation. Arab states as well as the Palestinian Authority recognised Israel with its occupation of Arab land, and have been conducting normal business with the aggressor state while its occupation and its systematic colonisation of Palestinian land continue relentlessly. Not once was ending the occupation first an Arab condition for negotiations with Israel or recognition of its existence.

One Israeli soldier fell captive in Arab hands five years ago. Until his release, few months ago, the whole world and most world media were fully mobilised to pressure the captors to release the Israeli soldier whose name was on every tongue. No statement, no comment by an official visitor to Israel, or related to any aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict, was ever issued without condemning the Palestinian captors and demanding the release of Gilad Shalit.

Few comments expressed disgruntlement with the lopsided logic of demanding the release of a lone Israeli prisoner while ignoring more than 10,000 Palestinians for years and decades in Israeli prisons. This, indeed, is an expressive contrast, but the reality is much harder than just that. The comparison should be more comprehensive. It is not only 10,000 Palestinians that are captive in Israeli jails, but the whole of Palestine with its entire population.

The Israeli soldier was taken prisoner while on active duty manning an Israeli military post laying siege to one million and-a-half Palestinians in the densely populated Gaza district. And yet, the aggressor deserved unanimous world support while the victims of occupation and suppression remain indefinitely under occupation, deprived of their natural and basic rights, and actually threatened with eradication, while the world remains deadly indifferent to what befell the Palestinians. Imagine the world fury if the situation were reversed.

I always opposed the idea of emphasising the sacred character of the city of Bethlehem to further validate the case against occupation, and accordingly demand its termination. No place has to be sacred in order to be protected from aggression or occupation. The freedom of any land and the people who live on it is always sacred and should not be subjected to injustice and undue restriction.

The same argument has regularly been used with respect to Jerusalem. The religious significance of the place is constantly mentioned to accentuate the ugliness of the occupation. The restriction of the freedom of worship by the occupying power of both Christians and Muslims in the holy city of Jerusalem is also often mentioned as an argument against the occupier. That may give the wrong implication that the occupation would be understandable if the place were not that holy, which is totally misleading and dangerous. The Israeli occupation of Arab lands in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon is illegal, and it should go. The freedom of the people suffering the worst and longest occupation in modern history is certainly sacred.

But Israel is not just an occupier. Its occupation has been the first phase in a larger scheme towards final colonisation and annexation of the entire land of Palestine. Failing to see it that way is sheer blindness. Failure to admit such a recognised reality is sheer cowardice and utter hypocrisy.

Banking on such worldwide hypocrisy and cowardice, Israel has been totally comfortable with its sustained aggression, continued construction of settlements, confiscation of Arab lands, demolition of houses after evacuating them of their lawful owners and building the apartheid wall to further strangle the lives of the occupied. Under such unprecedented circumstances, Israel has been quite comfortably enjoying the benefits of its criminality and lawlessness while being treated with respect and accepted, with the exception of the very mild and hesitant remarks when matters exceed all limits.

Israel’s apologists, supporters for that matter, justify their de facto endorsement of the occupation by referring to the so-called peace process. They simply pretend that so long as there are negotiations, there will be solutions for all the pending issues. That is why they continue to deny the failure of 20 years of futile and counterproductive negotiations that enabled the occupation to dig deeper and to create irreversible facts on the ground. They continue to deny such ongoing facts by insisting that the only course ahead is resumed negotiations, no matter what.

For the Christmas celebrations to serve the spiritual message they were originally intended to, Bethlehem should be liberated along with Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied Arab territories. Both Muslims and Christians have for decades been subjected to massive restrictions with respect to their freedom of worship and access to holy places. That is in addition to the humiliating restrictions applied daily on the Palestinians’ normal activity and life, with the undisguised occupier intent to make it too difficult for them to stay on their historic land.

Neither world powers nor the United Nations Organisation should stay silent about that, meekly succumbing to the fake claim that a “just” settlement is awaiting the conclusion of the negotiations.

Continued silence vis-à-vis the illegal Israeli occupation is an affront to civilisation, as well as to international law. It is time this ongoing aggression be stopped and victims of oppression freed. It is shameful to keep the holiest Christian site in the peaceful city of Bethlehem under occupation forever.