For the Palestinians: A life without hope [Archives:2006/926/Opinion]
While the world is busy talking about all the horrible demonstrations that Moslems have carried out against the devious “Danish cartoons” and whether Iran should exercise her legitimate sovereign rights, and as Moslems sit horribly idle while their brothers in Iraq and elsewhere are butchering each other, the news from Palestine has taken a comfortable back seat. Comfortable, of course for the ambitious Zionist demagogues, who continuously murder the Palestinians from the air and the ground, encircle them with concrete and electric barriers, subject them to the most dehumanizing processes just to go from one Palestinian “enclave” to another, deny them their democratic choice for representatives in Government and all the daily ongoing acts of elimination of any choice for a possible solution to the Palestinian problem. For Israel, that is the only choice it has accepted and is carrying it out with all the power it has at its disposal. It is really disheartening to believe that the world can be blinded to such systematic gross dehumanization of an entire people, who have been betrayed by their own kin of blood, neglected by the international community and rejected by those who are supposedly their neighbors seeking to live “side by side” with the people they previously have rooted out of the land that once used to be called Palestine. If that was not enough to deserve some justice from the international community, the Palestinians are now being systematically erased from existence in whatever is left of what used to be the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. The horrible conditions in what remains of Gaza and the West Bank shown in reports from western journalists and international human rights activists, who have had a chance (a chance that is getting tougher and tougher to get day by day) to see vividly are enough to make the hardest heart shed tears of disappointment at the state of human morality. The pictures painted by these reports indicate that the Palestinians are on the road to extinction as a viable citizenry for any form of Palestinian state, as their Israeli occupiers use every dehumanizing method that the geniuses of the International Zionist Establishment (in Israel and elsewhere) can come up with to make their life as miserable as it could ever be, if they get lucky to survive the starvation, deprivation from the most basic services and even the access to each other. Blockades, cement walls and “Jewish Only” roads have turned the West Bank and Gaza into large scale prisons, where even humanitarian laws on prisoner treatment are not applicable, because the prisons are enmeshed in what is presumed to be the territory of a sovereign Palestinian State. How much can a people sustain as they are subjected to the meanest bureaucratic procedures just to undertake normal activities that are needed for sustenance, education, medical treatment and so on. While Israel is adamantly showing its tough “no Hamas” attitude, presumably for the latter finding no other alternative but armed resistance, since all the peaceful theatrics played out by the international community and the “recognized” leadership to failure have proven no more than a farce and a long term purchase of time to allow the Zionist machine to unroll its mastery of the art of legitimate ethnic cleansing, the Palestinians have been confined to innumerable prison cells, with very difficult contact not only with the rest of the world, but even the other enclaves where other Palestinians are imprisoned. Camouflaged by an international nod's head and the unrestricted and unlimited protection of the World Superpower and an imaginary war on terror that has proved to be the fuel for more terrorism than the world has ever seen, the Israelis carry on with their long-term and steady plan for the absolute elimination of anything and everything Palestinian. Where is the sense of justice in the international community, while the Israelis are given every opportunity to carry out their mischief and their full conquest of the Holy Land, while the Palestinians are denied not only the chance to live any semblance of normal life, but the right to live as well?
Hassan Al-Haifi has been a Yemeni political economist and journalist for more than 20 years.
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