clear

Creating new perspectives since 2009

They want a ‘people without a cause’

September 3, 2018 at 9:53 am

Palestinian children are seen at a UNRWA school in Gaza [Middle East Monitor / Mohammad Asad]

There are many players today in the international and regional political arena who are contributing to the liquidation of the Palestinian cause. There is a consensus that the current period of time we are living in is the most difficult for us as Palestinians in the history of our cause and struggle against the occupier.

If we look carefully at what is happening around us, we can see clearly and easily how regional and international parties under the leadership of the United States of America, and under the influence of political visions and instructions in Israel, are working together in their specific role to eradicate the issue that drove most of the countries’ leaders crazy for decades. In other words, the cause has become like a lemon in the grip of a metal juicer, being pressed from all sides in order to completely empty its contents.

The truth is that there are four integrated elements that go hand in hand with each other, and I do not believe that any of them were presented before or after another coincidentally or randomly. Whoever determined these elements is looking for the fruit they are going to ultimately reap, i.e. “a people without a cause” or an issue of human and lifestyle affairs for a group of people, no more, no less. These elements are as follows:

Read: No one has the power to change the nature of the agency’s work, insists UNRWA

First, the international community, whether silent or active, is all under the leadership and command of the United States, which is on its way to end the major pending issues, or, as politicians call them, “final status issues”. After President Trump eliminated the Jerusalem issue from the negotiations table given the Arab, Muslim, and even Palestinian silence and timidity, it was time to eliminate the refugees’ issue by suspending US funding for UNRWA. The US is considered the greatest contributor to the UNRWA’s budget, as it used to provide $360 million, equivalent to one third of the agency’s budget of $1.3 billion. This means that several of the five million Palestinian refugees will be stripped of their refugee status, in order to limit them to a few thousand. In addition to this, these events are considered an indicator of a true catastrophe that will be witnessed by the Palestinian territories represented by the closure of a number of schools and health clinics as well as thousands of employees on their way to unemployment.

Second is the strategy of pressuring the Gaza Strip as an old new attempt to strip the resistance of its weapons without anything in exchange. After failing to achieve this goal during the summer war in 2014, Israel resorted to various means and methods, but I do not know what benefit they will achieve if this occurred.

Third is the settler state in the West Bank, which practices daily violations and confiscations at the hands of those running the settlement project, expelling people living in villages adjacent to settlements from their homes and villages. In addition to this, their homes are demolished under the pretext of the lack of a permit, which takes several years to obtain. To top it all off, the internal arrangements within the ranks of the settlers is to hold elections in the settlements to coincide with municipal elections in the occupied cities, meaning that the settlements have the same rights and more, and therefore the West Bank is no different to Tel Aviv and Haifa, and could even be more important.

Read: The UNRWA crisis has both repercussions and solutions

Fourthly, the Israeli policy of bypassing the PA’s functional role, although related to the aforementioned issues, I have singled it out for its importance, by means of direct contact with the Palestinian population through the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories. Such contact includes removing the security ban, cancelling the travel ban, daily summons, and similar acts that aim to whitewash the image of the occupation in the minds of the Palestinians and make it desirable and desired, especially after the Palestinian division has reached an unprecedented depth.

#UNRWA

In conclusion it is now imperative for the official, civil and factional Palestinian leadership to find ways to effectively confront these tools, which are destroying the Palestinian cause. They must also work to genuinely reinforce the factors of the Palestinian people’s steadfastness, starting with lifting the sanctions imposed on the Gaza Strip and achieving national unity. Furthermore, they must determine a collective general position on negotiations, the goals of which, after all of these concessions, is no longer present.

This article first appeared in Arabic in the Palestinian Information Centre on 2 September 2018

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.