MIFTAH
Tuesday, 19 March. 2024
 
Your Key to Palestine
The Palestinian Initiatives for The Promotoion of Global Dialogue and Democracy
 
 
 

With the advent of meetings yesterday in Gaza between Hamas leaders and Egyptian diplomats that produced no results, it was announced that hopes for a possible ceasefire were once again dashed. (It was a ceasefire, mind you, that Israel announced it would reject, even if Hamas agreed to it.) This comes after several days of the Americans and British laying blame for the halt in the road map over the past week nearly entirely in the machine-gun toting hands of Hamas. When President George Bush laid it on Hamas, he laid it on thick, saying, among other things that "it is clear that the free world, those who love freedom and peace, must deal harshly with Hamas and the killers" of Israelis. But when Bush condemned Israel last week for its attempted assassination of Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, he only just grazed the tip of the iceberg. Because Israel’s assassination policy is just one in a slew of extreme policies of the occupation that result in acute frustration for not just Palestinian militants but also for all Palestinian civilians.

In alphabetical order, these policies include: annexation, apartheid wall, checkpoints, closures, collective punishment, curfews, detentions, excessive force, expulsion, house demolitions, incursions, landmines, tree uprooting, racial profiling, refugees, settlements, shelling, torture, water.

Need I say more?

Yes. Because sadly, for much of the international community – most importantly, the United States – the devastating effect on the lives of ordinary Palestinians goes unacknowledged. Yet these brutish occupation policies have combined to create an atmosphere that merits utter frustration by Palestinians. A simple thing like traveling from one village to another can be a difficult, painful, and humiliating event in the daily life of a Palestinian, because it means planning far in advance, leaving plenty of extra travel time for checkpoints, and suffering the humiliation of a 18-year-old Israeli soldier ordering you around and making you wait for what could be hours.

And that’s on a good day. On a bad day, the average Palestinian may also suffer from serious intimidation and even straight-out violence, not to mention unannounced closures of checkpoints, leaving civilians stuck in (or out of) cities for hours, or even days, at a time. Men – and women – have died, and been killed, at these checkpoints. For example, the 95-year-old Palestinian woman named Fattier Mohammed Hassan who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in the backseat of her taxi while waiting to cross a checkpoint at the outskirts of Ramallah last year. She was just one of the 2,303 victims of Israeli violence since the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Is this the policy of a country ready to make peace? Is this the policy of a country that deserves no censure?

It is time that President Bush and the rest of the world add this catalogue of occupation policies to its list for condemnation. Indeed, direct killing (whether by suicide bombers or Israeli shelling or shooting) deserve strong denunciation, but it must also be acknowledged that these drastic policies of the Israeli occupation are responsible for deaths, not to mention major damage to the financial stability, the health, and the psychology of ordinary Palestinian civilians in all aspects of their lives. These are real roadblocks to peace.

Leila Saad is a graduate student at Harvard University at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Written by the author exclusively for MIFTAH.

 
 
Read More...
 
 
By the Same Author
 
Footer
Contact us
Rimawi Bldg, 3rd floor
14 Emil Touma Street,
Al Massayef, Ramallah
Postalcode P6058131

Mailing address:
P.O.Box 69647
Jerusalem
 
 
Palestine
972-2-298 9490/1
972-2-298 9492
info@miftah.org

 
All Rights Reserved © Copyright,MIFTAH 2023
Subscribe to MIFTAH's mailing list
* indicates required