The Palesitinians have been under Israeli occupation for 40 years.

How the 1967 War Doomed Israel

For Jews of my generation who came of age during the anti-apartheid struggle, there was no shaking the nagging sense that what Israel was doing in the West Bank was exactly what the South African regime was doing in the townships. Even as we waged our own intifada against apartheid in South Africa, we saw daily images of young Palestinians facing heavily armed Israeli police in tanks and armored vehicles with nothing more than stones, gasoline bombs and the occasional light weapon; a whole community united behind its children who had decided to cast off the yoke under which their parents suffered. And when Yitzhak Rabin, more famous as a signatory on the Oslo Agreement, ordered the Israeli military to systematically break the arms of young Palestinians in the hope of suppressing an entirely legitimate revolt, thuggery had become a matter of national policy. It was only when some of those same young men began blowing themselves up in Israeli restaurants and buses that many Israel supporters were once again able to construe the Israelis as the victim in the situation; during the intifada of the 1980s they could not question who was David and who was Goliath. Even for those of us who had grown up in the idealism of the left-Zionist youth movements, Israel had become a grotesque parody of everything we stood for.

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Looking Back on 40 Years of Occupation

Israel captured and occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank 40 years ago this week. The victory was celebrated as a great triumph, at once tripling the size of the land under Israeli control, including East Jerusalem. It was, however, a Pyrrhic victory. As the occupation stretched over the decades, it transformed and deformed Israeli society. It led Israel to abandon the norms and practices of a democratic society until, in the name of national security, it began to routinely accept the brutal violence of occupation and open discrimination and abuse of Palestinians, including the torture of prisoners and collective reprisals for Palestinians attacks. Palestinian neighborhoods, olive groves and villages were, in the name of national security, bulldozed into the ground. Israel’s image has shifted from that of a heroic, open society set amid a sea of despotic regimes to that of an international pariah. Israel’s West Bank separation barrier, built ostensibly to keep out Palestinian bombers, has also been used to swallow huge tracts of the West Bank into Israel. Palestinian towns are ringed by Israeli checkpoints. Major roads in the West Bank are reserved for Israeli settlers. The U.N. estimates that about half the West Bank is now off-limits to Palestinians. And every week there are new reports of Palestinian produce that is held up until it rots, pregnant women giving birth in cars because they cannot get to hospitals, and even senseless and avoidable deaths, such as one young woman who died recently when she couldn’t get through a checkpoint to her kidney dialysis treatment. "We are raising commanders who are policemen,” former Israeli General Amiram Levine told the newspaper Maariv. “We ask them to excel at the checkpoint. What does it means to excel at the checkpoint? It means being enough of a bastard to delay a pregnant woman from getting to the hospital.”

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Four Decades of Occupation
Dispossession and Humiliation

"I don't know what I would do if my daughter had to go through that humiliation." A U.S. congressman said those words to me while watching Qalandia checkpoint, the key Israeli roadblock between occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. As we mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 war and Israel's military occupation of Palestinian territory, his comment is particularly poignant. As both a Palestinian and an American, I wonder what my fellow Americans would do if they lived for 40 years with every aspect of their lives controlled by a foreign army, or what members of Congress would do if they had to pass through an occupier's checkpoint on Capitol Hill.

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Losing Palestine to al-Qaeda

An above the fold front page piece in today’s New York Times makes a hard-hitting contribution to pulling people's heads out of the sand on Palestinian issues and to realizing that the alternative to Hamas may not be a return to the warm familiarity of Fatah, but rather a lurch in the direction of al-Qaedism. The article “Jihadist Groups Fill a Palestinian Power Vacuum,” looks at the situation both in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in Gaza. Steven Erlanger and Hassan Fattah describe a series of recent attacks in Gaza against internet cafés, music stores, and international schools, in addition to the ongoing standoff at Nahr al-Bared in Tripoli, Lebanon. They explain that in the context of the weakening of both Fatah and Hamas and the increasingly violent rivalry between them “Jihadi freelancers with murky links are filling a vacuum.” The piece gets really interesting when they introduce Mr. Taha from the Ain al Hilwe refugee camp near Sidon. Mr. Taha confides to us that “there is a central problem and that is al-Qaeda and they are spreading…The Islamic awakening…is going to become a huge problem for us.” And here’s the punchline from the NYT: “Mr. Taha’s fears are remarkable because of who he is: not a secular campaigner or a Fatah apparatchik, but a senior member of Hamas.” This is what prospectsforpeace.com has been arguing - that al-Qaeda and Hamas are not the same thing and to lump them together makes not only for bad analysis, but also for bad policy - plus, the kind of political Islamic movements represented by Hamas may be the last line of defense before we see the proliferation of an even more powerful al-Qaedist threat. And for the umpteenth time, no, this does not turn Hamas into a bunch of lovable teddy bears. The world is more complex than good guys vs. bad guys. More often than not, sensible political alliance-building has to be with imperfect inhabitants of a broad grey area. To re-cap: the focus of Hamas is on opposing the occupation and reforming Palestinian society, the focus of Al-Qaeda is on opposing the West per se and spear-heading a violent revolution in the Arab and Muslim worlds - the one is reformist the other revolutionary; one nationalist, the other post-nationalist; one grievance-based, the other fundamental.

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  thanks to The Agonist