One
Week In July
By Sonja Karkar
01 August, 2007
The
Electronic Intifada
One
could be excused for thinking that Israel's human rights violations
against the Palestinians stopped since the Palestinian factions began
fighting each other. Just about every report and article written in
the Western media these past weeks have focused on the rift between
Fatah and Hamas and US overtures to broker a peace deal that may finally
allow the Palestinians a state of sorts. Any mention of Israel is in
the light of urbane diplomatic discussions between it and the other
main players minus, of course, Hamas with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert showing a most remarkable willingness to agree to a peace settlement
that would see the Palestinians getting back around 90 per cent of the
West Bank. If only there was reason to believe that the leopard has
changed its spots.
The truth of the matter is
that nothing has changed on the ground for the Palestinians. Israel
is rolling into the occupied Palestinian territories with its tanks
and armored vehicles and using its war planes to fire rockets on an
already severely beleaguered people in Gaza. Only last week, there were
at least twenty-nine such military incursions that ended up with four
Palestinian resistance fighters being executed by Israeli soldiers while
a fifth Palestinian ended up dying from tank shell wounds. Palestinian
civilians always bear the brunt of such incursions and eleven people
were seriously wounded including five children and an elderly woman.
The daily arrest of civilians has been routine for decades, but certainly
the seventy-two civilians arrested this week make a mockery of the 250
prisoners just released as Israel's goodwill gesture to Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas.
These are specific attacks
on people that will be recorded as statistics. However, we do not hear
about the personal agony of families as they see their fathers, mothers,
brothers, sisters, sons and daughters die. Neither do we hear about
the suffering these families must endure if any of them survive crippled
physically and emotionally for life. These human details disappear into
the homogeneous whole of the conflict, with so far no promise that tomorrow
or next week, there will not be new victims. Such is the terror endured
for forty years of Israel's unrelenting occupation. And that is not
counting the horrendous ethnic cleansing that Israel engaged in over
a twenty year period before that.
As for the recently promised
easing of restrictions on movement in the West Bank, Palestinians have
only seen more checkpoints erected with ever greater severity in who
can go where and if they will be allowed to go at all. Similarly in
Gaza, Israel refuses to lift the siege on this tiny strip of land with
its burgeoning population and is refusing to allow European observers
to open Rafah crossing. This has left some 6,000 Palestinians stuck
for weeks now on the Egyptian side of the border unable to return home.
More than a dozen Palestinians have died when their health deteriorated
fatally in the harsh conditions. The commercial crossings are being
opened only long enough to allow in the bare essential food aid that
will just keep the Palestinians from starving to death.
Perhaps the most tendentious
of Olmert's promises is the "land for peace" deal with promises
made and nothing delivered. Just more of the same. Sharon was a master
at such dissembling tactics -- going along with the Quartet's Road Map
for peace while he furiously and illegally engaged in new and expanding
Jewish settlement building in the West Bank. The settlers he pulled
out of Gaza in his much-lauded unilateral disengagement project are
even now being re-settled illegally in the West Bank. Olmert's own propensity
for such deceit on the settlement project was exposed last month in
a Jerusalem Post news report that quoted a senior Israeli diplomat stating:
"We are being sent abroad, quite simply to lie" and Peace
Now Secretary-General Yariv Oppenheimer said that Olmert's government
"had built more settlements than any previous government."
It is the ordinary people
who are suffering nearly every human rights violation imaginable at
the hands of Israel's army, the fanatical Jewish settlers and Israel's
policy makers and spin doctors who have never seen the Palestinians
as human beings. The world media fail to report Israel's crimes although
it is absolutely clear that Israel has breached and continuous to breach
international law. For the Palestinians living this cold and brutal
reality, Israel's true intentions are very apparent. If Olmert has indeed
had a change of heart, then a bona fide way of showing that would be
to immediately commit to a timeline and begin easing the restrictions
on movement as he has promised Abbas and to stop all settlement building
and expansion as he falsely claims has been done. There is little cause
for hope, though, if the last fourteen years of peace games are anything
to go by. Yielding absolutely nothing for the Palestinians, these peace
games have only resulted in Palestinians losing even more of their land
to Israel and suffer more bloodshed and destitution at the hands of
Israel's minions. With nothing being said about Israel's violations
during last week of July by those talking peace, that is reason enough
to worry that the welfare of all Palestinians is not what is priority
in the minds of those negotiating this so-called peace.
Sonja Karkar is
the founder and president of Women
for Palestine in Melbourne, Australia.
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