For 64 years the Palestinians have patiently and steadfastly continued their struggle for justice, enduring the longest occupation in modern history.
Recently, however, other events throughout the region have dominated the world’s press. First, the ‘war on terror’, then the invasion of Iraq, apprehension about a nuclear Iran, and now the turmoil of the Arab revolutions.
Has the Palestinian cause been side-lined, or even forgotten, in the clamour for democracy and the horror of so much violence?
Six Palestinian hunger-strikers lie close to death having refused food for up to 76?? days, but even in the Arab press their sacrifice is not given the attention it deserves.
Indeed, the Arab press has relegated most stories about Palestine to the inside pages, not only because of the drama of the Arab revolutions but also out of disillusionment with political infighting, the weakness and corruption of the ineffectual Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and the shortcomings of its leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Disappointment too, perhaps, that the Palestinians haven’t yet joined the revolutionary club and taken to the streets of the West Bank and Gaza in their thousands.
But the Nakba (catastrophe) is not forgotten, because the Palestinian question is deeply embedded in the Arab psyche, and the Palestinians flag is still the flag that is flown to demonstrate Arab solidarity from Tahrir Square to Benghazi.
Nevertheless, we must be watchful: the absence of the Palestinian voice in the media and global consciousness suits Israel very well.
Robbed of identity
The Israeli propaganda machine has become adept at obscuring the Palestinian cause with other stories while its own atrocities against the Palestinians continue unnoticed. While one illegal colony after another is built on Palestinian land, and the gargantuan apartheid wall continues to snake its way through Palestinian olive groves and orchards, imprisoning both Arabs and Jews in mutual hatred and mistrust.
There is still no Palestinian state — the very least that was acceptable — and latterly, to add insult to injury, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants Israel’s 1.5 million Arabs to recognise this portion of their homeland as a ‘Jewish’ state. To be robbed not only of their territory but of their very identity.
The two-state solution is dead because, for all his protestations to the contrary, Netanyahu does not want peace. Netanyahu took his time replying to Abbas’ letter and when he did, it was only to reject the Palestinian president’s demand to halt colony building and to repeat the call for an unconditional return to talks. He has continued with the colonies while many of the world’s strongest governments and their representatives at the UN stand silently by.
Also, and most dangerously, Israel has been allowed to develop its own nuclear capability completely unchecked and unsupervised while whipping up an international panic about Iran. And in a great historical irony, as Israel gears up for war with Iran, it is provided with nuclear submarines by Germany.
Thankfully, Germany has also produced Gunter Grass, the 84 year old Nobel laureate, who has enraged the Israelis with a poem he published last month called What Must Be Said in which he warns that Israel is the most powerful threat to ‘already fragile world peace’.
Grass says that the Nazi’s ‘incomparable’ crimes against the Jews, and fear of being accused of anti-semitism had prevented him from criticising Israel for decades but ‘I will be silent no longer,’ he told an interviewer, ‘because I am sick of the hypocrisy of the West’.
As expected, the octogenarian has been savaged by Israel, and the fact that he was a member of the Hitler Youth as a very young boy has been used against him — but this horrible psychological experience of mass hysteria and evil informed his book The Tin Drum which is one of the great anti-war literary works.
That Grass speaks out is indicative of a welcome new mood in the international community which is not, perhaps, reflected in the mainstream media.
Online, independent news outlets and citizen journalists are able to tell the truth about what is happening in the Occupied Territories, and their accounts are shared around the globe.
Hundreds of thousands in the Arab world and in the West demonstrated against the 2008/9 massacre in Gaza, and again when the Israelis murdered peace activists as they attempted to bring aid to Gaza in a flotilla of little boats.
More of the world’s citizens than ever are ‘sick of the hypocrisy’ and more conscious than ever that, ultimately, the failure to find a just settlement for the Palestinians remains central to the region’s instability.
Sadly, the PNA, which is entrusted with representing the Palestinians, has been unable to make any diplomatic capital out of this support
On this 64th anniversary of the original catastrophe, Abbas should dissolve the PNA and resign. This would be the best martyrdom effort against Israel and would involve no bloodshed.
Palestinians have tried everything to reclaim their land and dignity: guerrilla warfare, decades of fruitless peace talks, human bombs, and now a mass hunger strike by 1,600 prisoners… but to date it has all been in vain, America and other world powers continue to support Israel unconditionally.
I believe the third intifada is on its way. There is no alternative. It is only awaiting a spark. Just as Tunisia’s Bouazzizi was the spark that ignited the Arab revolutions, if one of the heroes of the hunger strikes dies the Occupied Territories will erupt and maybe this time, the blood of the martyrs will not be shed in vain.
Abdel Bari Atwan is editor of the pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi.
