Israeli onslaught against the Palestinian civilians has been going on unchecked and more so in recent times. The tempo has been upped several notches with the arrival of Donald Trump as the President of the United States in the White House as the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes that Trump will see eye to eye on all of Netanyahu’s current policies of dashing a two-state solution, much to the dismay of Palestinians and the rest of the civilised world.
Netanyahu is convinced that key personnel on Trump’s cabinet, along with a self-professed pro-Zionist selected for the post of US ambassador to Israel, will help cement his grip on the remaining Palestinian lands and with some covert acts of terrorism, force the native population to flee or else die defending their little plot on earth.
The choices remaining today for Palestinians are bleak as the might of the Israeli army along with the terrorism inflicted on them by illegal colonists leave them with very little room for manoeuvre. There are signs that another intifada is in the making.
Intifada, as we have come to know it, is the word to describe the Palestinian people’s resistance to oppression by illegal Israeli occupiers. The first one that captured the world’s attention began in 1987, when Palestinian civilians rose in an uprising against Israel — a resistance that lasted six years, ending in 1993. This was the first time the free world witnessed on live TV scenes young Palestinians hurling rocks against Israeli tanks. This resistance movement was countered by a heavily armed Israeli force and thousands of Palestinians lost their lives, were injured or imprisoned indefinitely.
With Israeli oppression and illegal occupation showing no signs of slowing down, a second intifada began some seven years later and lasted for about five years. Again the resistance was met by intensified Israeli bombings and artillery shelling, much of which were fired indiscriminately at Palestinian civilian areas and which led to some international relief organisations objecting to the Israeli ploy of indiscriminately targeting civilian areas.
Much of the international community was appalled by what they witnessed. The Israeli attacks were terror crimes. The Palestinians went into the second intifada as another desperate uprising against Israeli oppression. The violence and brutality by the Israelis and the resistance from hapless Palestinians in the face of overwhelming odds displayed to the world the extent of the sheer despair felt by the Palestinian people. They had nothing else to fight with but for some smuggled explosives, missiles and stones wrenched from the streets.
More than 1,000 Israelis died during this uprising, the death toll shocking the Zionist regime into a resumption of the peace process. Israeli reprisals and terror tactics were through employing the liberal use of bombings and assassinations, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and the gunning down of young children holding rocks. A reporter in one of the war zones described it as, “This was a savage conflict in which the Israelis sought to use the old Nazi tactic of revenge attacks designed to produce a multiple of their own dead. The three-to-one ratio of Palestinian-to-Israeli victims is incontrovertible evidence of this deliberate policy”.
In 2005, the then Israeli premier Ariel Sharon and the Palestinian president agreed to stop all acts of violence and return to the negotiating table. It was widely reported at the time that many suspected “further Israeli manoeuvres to escape a peace deal”, but for the Palestinians, it was perceived as a victory. However, it came with tragic costs. More than 3,000 civilians lost their lives in the struggle for freedom.
Any attempt to present these war crimes on the global stage were met with howls of anti-Semitism and justified as self-defence. This has been Israel’s modus operandi for several decades now, extracting uncensored latitude to commit state-sponsored terrorism on the native population by slapping their western partners with guilt.
Israel’s blasting apart of women and children and shooting young stone-throwing demonstrators were never perceived as an act of terrorism that it most assuredly is, but as “legitimate self-defence”. By contrast, Palestinian self-defence was always charged as a terror crime.
Israel has more than once been censured by the United Nations for the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. Today, its policies are no different than that of Nazi Germany’s 80 years ago — complete with war crimes and crimes against humanity. And yet, the killings and illegal colonies continue.
Will Trump resist Israel’s empty howls of self-defence and put a stop to their illegal colony expansion and ongoing brutality? While early signs are not encouraging, only time will tell.
Tariq A. Al Maeena is a Saudi socio-political commentator. He lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@talmaeena.
