The International Crisis Group with US Middle East Project (USMEP), released on 28 March 2022 their Middle East Briefing N°86, under the title of “The Israeli Government’s Old-New Palestine Strategy”, which says, in short, “that the current Israeli government is pursuing the same policies and strategies of the earlier governments, which basically depends on buying time in order to change what left of the status quo in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and make the two state solution practically impossible.” Depriving Palestinians of their own independent state simply means that there will be a world without Palestine.
This brings to my mind the Russian president Vladimir Putin who threatened to wipe off life on this planet if his country faces an existential threat, because, from his view point, there is no meaning for a world without Russia. This is not an exaggeration in a sentimental moment, it seems to be deeply rooted in the minds and hearts of Russians. Just after that, the famous Russian philosopher, political analyst, and strategist, Aleksandr Dugin repeated same ideas at Aljazeera and justified them thoroughly. Indeed, this seems to be the mind set of all those countries who own the nuclear weapons, for what they call deterrence. You could imagine that the United States used nuclear weapons for much lesser than existential threat. They came to the brink of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union during president Kennedy’s time, over the Russian missiles in Cuba. Just few years ago in 2016, the British Prime Minister, “Theresa May has said she would be willing to authorize a nuclear strike that could kill 100,000 people, as the House of Commons voted overwhelming to replace Britain’s Trident program”.
In the case of Palestine, in almost one year’s time, countless reports, human rights organizations, politicians, diplomats and academics stressed the ICG’s conclusions. The Report of the special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, delivered in United Nation Human Rights Council distributed on 21 March 2022, The Amnesty International the comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, on 1 February 2022, then the Human Rights Watch issued in 27 April 2021, under the title of “A Threshold Crossed, Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”. Then there are the reports of the Israeli Human Rights organizations such as, B’Tselem and Yesh Din and the Palestinian ones such as Al-Haq, Addameer and Almezan, all these are shelfed and little has been done by the signatories to compel Israel to abide with international laws.
With all the appalling facts, numbers, cases and conclusions, mentioned in these reports, the International Crisis Group’s briefing caught my attention more than the rest, because it concentrates more on the political rather than on the human rights side, and as we all know, politics is the mother of all problems and solutions. The briefing reflects deep knowledge of the reasons behind the conflict and has a clear idea how to reduce the tension and reach a kind of a solution. Yet, I am not going to comment on their extremely important conclusions, as that might need an independent article, what draws my attention is the American and European stand on the conflict as the report described it,
“Meanwhile, external actors stand by nearly mute, except in certain isolated cases encompassing some but not most new settlements and home evictions. Part of it is fear of upsetting the fragile coalition government. The U.S. under President Joe Biden would likely have been more forward-leaning in its criticism of Israel’s terrorism designation of six Palestinian civil society organizations, for example, or of aspects of its settlement-building enterprise had the government in charge been Netanyahu-led. But regardless of who is in power in Israel, the U.S. has little interest in confronting Israel, especially while it is involved in sensitive negotiations with Iran to revive the nuclear deal – a goal the Israeli leadership opposes. As for European states, they appear to have largely washed their hands of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, divided internally, under little domestic pressure to act and now, of course, gripped by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Then the report reaches a very serious conclusion, that summarizes the American and European stand on the issue of Palestine, and how they were real culprit in the misery of the Palestinian people. Of course, this is just a glimpse, the full report deserves a lot of attention and study,
“The result is that, instead of taking steps to reduce conflict and push for serious peace talks, international actors are enabling Israel’s repression and, through near silence, letting Israel keep acting with impunity. Absent more decisive action and a thorough rethinking of the international approach to the conflict, this path can only lead further away from the two-state solution they profess to support, while further eroding Palestinian rights and encouraging renewed violence.”
As it is evident from the report, there is an Israeli and international effort to make this world without Palestine, and if a world without Russia does not deserve to exist, or even any nuclear country, then what message the World sends to Palestinians, and why should they be blamed for whatever they might do to have their homeland back and rebuild their own state?
