The Disputes between the Israelis and the Palestinians

                                       

If you click your mouse over the underlined words, you will get more information.

There is an old adage that says that gasoline and flames shouldn’t be mixed together.  Who is the gasoline and who are the flames when referring to the Israelis and the Palestinians living in Israel? 

ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip conflicts for the past 51 years.The ongoing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians began in the mid-20^th century. The origins to the conflict can be traced back to Jewish immigration and sectarian conflict in British control of what was then called Palestine between Jews and Arabs. It has been referred to as the world's "most intractable conflict"

In 1975, I was invited by the United Nations to be a speaker at the Fifth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Prisoners which was cnducted at the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

A participant attending that Congress who was representing the Palestinian Liberation Organization approached me and asked me if I would speak to the head of the Israelis delegation which was one of over a hundred and fifty delegations attending that congress while representing their countries from  around the world  

He asked me to tell the Israelis that the Palestinians living in Israel would be willing to be Israelis citizens or alternatively, be given a portion of Israel that would be entirely Palestinian. The head of the Israelis delegation told me to tell the Palestinian representative that neither possibilities would ever happen in either of their lifetimes.

Subsequently, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians continued in Israel, not withstanding the fact that the late Yasser Arafat who was the Chairman of the PLO kept his word to me that the PLO would publically denounce terrorism and no longer sanction terrorist acts in future Olympic games like they did in Munich in 1972.  During the 1976 Olympic Games held in Canada and all the other Games that followed, Jewish athletes were never attacked by Palestinian terrorists. Canada kept my word to Arafat that the PLO could have an office in Ottawa, Canada’s capital if he kept his word to me—which he did.

As fate intervened, the Oslo Accord, signed  between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, created the administrative districts with varying levels of Palestinian autonomy within each area. Area C, in which Israel maintained complete civil and security control, accounts for over 60% of the territory of the West Bank.   

Officially, there is no internationally recognized line between Israel and Palestine subsequently the borders are considered to be disputed, and have been for decades. So is the status of Palestine. Some countries consider Palestine to be an independent state, while others (like the US) consider Palestine to be territories under Israeli occupation. Both Israelis and Palestinians have claims to the land going back centuries, but the present-day borders are continuously disputed.

This problem primarily is not about religion. The dispute is over who gets what land and how it is controlled. Unfortunately for both sides,  that gets them into a lot of really thorny issues, like such as  where are the borders? Can Palestinian refugees return to their former homes in present-day Israel?

Alas, the decades-long process of resolving that conflict has created another, overlapping conflict and that is managing the very unpleasant Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, in which Israel has put the Palestinians under suffocating military occupation and Palestinian militant groups have terrorize Israelis.

Area C comprises of an area of 220 square km, (131 square miles) consisting of the northwest quarter of the Dead Sea. As of July 2017 it has an estimated population of 2,747,943 Palestinians, and approximately 391,000 Israeli settlers who had already lived there prior to the signing of the Acord.  Further, approximately another 201,200 Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem. The international community considers Israeli settlements currently in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem as living legitimately in those two areas since they had already lived there before the Acord was signed.

Before the State of Israel was established in 1948, the West Bank and Gaza Strip were simply parts of Mandate Palestine; their ‘borders’ are the result of Israeli expansion and armistice lines. Prior to Israeli occupation, the West Bank was controlled by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip controlled by Egypt. 

Israeli justice system applies in the West Bank, where Israelis are living under civilian rule and Palestinians are governed by Israelis military law. Though the legal systems are different—military court versus civil court, the relevant law is implied impartially," said Yehuda Shefer, a deputy state prosecutor who is head of a Justice Ministry committee for West Bank law enforcement.

Did Israel invade the Palestinian territory of Gaza in July 2014, leading to the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, many of them children? They did. The reason was that the militant Palestinian group called Hamas  fired rockets into civilian neighborhoods in Israel? How did that latest round of violence start in the first place — and why do the Israelis and Palestinians hate one another at all?   

Israel is an officially Jewish nation located in the Middle East. Palestine is a set of two physically separate, ethnically Arab and mostly Muslim territories such as the West Bank and Gaza that is next to the Mediterranean.

There is no doubt in my mind that when Israelis armed forces  marched into Gaza, they were justified in doing so because Gazan Hamas terrorists were slipping into Israel and killing innocent Israelis and also firing rockets into Israel.      

The Israelis should have remained there until all the Hamas leaders were captured and imprisoned in an Israeli prison so that decent Gazian leaders could be found to replace the terrorist Hamas leaders.  But as sure as God made little apples, the Hamas leaders later ordered more rockets being fired into Israel. The Israelis have justifiably retaliated but not to the extent undertaken in the invasion that caused so many deaths in Gaza.

Those two dimensions of the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis are made even worse by the long, bitter, violent history between these two peoples.

It's not just that there is lots of resentment and distrust.  Israelis and Palestinians have such widely divergent narratives of the last 70-plus years, of what has happened and why so that even reconciling their two realities are extremely difficult to bring about. All of this makes it easier for extremists, who oppose any compromise and want to destroy or subjugate the other side entirely, to control the conversation and derail the peace.  

Something we often hear is that "both sides" are to blame for perpetuating the conflict, and there's plenty of truth to that. There has always been and remains plenty of culpability to go around, plenty of individuals and groups on both sides that squandered peace and perpetuated conflict many times over. Still, perhaps the most essential truth of the Israel-Palestine conflict today is that the conflict predominantly matters for the human suffering it causes. And while Israelis certainly suffer deeply and in great numbers, the vast majority of the conflict's toll is incurred by Palestinian civilians

What my concern is that current settlers are Israelis who moved into the West Bank. They are widely considered to violate international law, which forbids an occupying force from moving its citizens into occupied territory. Many of the 500,000 settlers are just looking for cheap housing; most live within a few miles of the Israeli border, often in the around surrounding Jerusalem.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Israelis government approves of the intrusion of Israelis settlers moving into the land that only belongs to the Palestinians.

On July 21^st, 2019, Israelis Security forces moved in to Sur Baher, a Palestinian neighborhood on the southeastern outskirts of East Jerusalem to tear down buildings said to house 17 Palestinians.  The residents of those buildings said that they had been given permits to build their homes in the buildings by the Palestinian Authority.  They accused Israel of an attempt to grab more of the land of the Palestinian West Bank. But Israeli Public Security Minister, Gilad Erdan said Israel's Supreme Court had ruled that "the illegal construction constitutes a severe security threat and as such, the Palestinian Authority had violated a construction ban by warding g those permits in the first place.

In my opinion, The Palestinian Authority should have discussed this matter with the Israelis first when considering the fact that the property was so close to the border.  If there was no agreement re that issue, an arbitrator should have been appointed.  

Some 700 Israeli police officers and 200 soldiers were involved in that operation in the village of Wadi Hummus, on the edge of Sur Baher. They moved in along with excavators, which began tearing down the 10 buildings the UN says were earmarked for demolition. Nine of the Palestinians who have been displaced are refugees, including five children, according to the United Nations. Another 350 people who owned homes in buildings that were unoccupied or under construction are also affected.

This kind of conduct reminds me of the Nazis moving into the properties of Jews in Germany back in the 1930s and 1940s. There is no doubt in my mind that during the drafting of the Oslo Acord, the Palestinian negotiators did not agree that Israelis intrusion ins their land was to be   part of the joint agreements.

The Palestinian Authority’s Prime Minister. Mohammad Shtayyeh said that the Palestinians would complain to the International Criminal Court about this grave aggression. 

Will the Israelis later permit Israelis settlers to build their homes in that disputed land?

The United Nations has denounced what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians by destroying their homes.

To add to the Palestinians suffering even more, in the short term, Israelis settlers of all forms make life for Palestinians even more difficult, by forcing the Israeli government to guard them with walls or soldiers that further constrain Palestinians. In the long term, the settlers create what are sometimes called "facts on the ground such as Israelis communities that blur the borders and expand land that Israel could claim for itself in any eventual future peace deal.

There is only one possible solution to solve this problem of land grabbing by the Israelis. 

FIRST:  The United Nations  should  appoint an international Commission to solve this intrusion problem.

SECOND: The Commission has the authority to define the actual borders and build a fence on the borders in order to delineate the lands belonging to the Palestinians and the lands belonging to the Israelis.

THIRD:  There to be no more Israelis settlers taking over lands that belong to the Palestinians and no Palestinians who already  own lands on the Palestinian  part of Israel should be permitted to sell their property to Israelis.

FOURTH:  Any Israelis living on Palestinian lands must abide by the Palestinian civil and criminal laws even though they are still Israelis citizens. If they have Israelis passports, they should be passed through entry points without any difficulty.

FIFTH:  If they choose to work in the Palestinian section of Israel, they should have that option and they will pay taxes to the Palestinian authority if they choose that option. 

SIXTH:   The Palestinians will have its own police force, premier and elected legislators sitting in its Legislature that govern the Palestinian lands which Israel treats as a province of Israel.

SEVENTH:  

If any Palestinian commits a terrorist act against any Israeli in Israel and returns to the Palestinian province, the Palestinian police wo arrested that person will  turn the terrorist  over to the Israelis.

EIGHTH: Israel will come to aid of the Palestinians if they are attacked by outside forces. 

Already I can hear the response of the Israelis. “NOT IN OUR LIFE TIME!”

If they don’t agree to those terms (which I think are reasonable), then maybe sanctions against the leaders of Israel could be used to encourage them to accept the terms.

The same eight solutions could be available for the people living in Gaza.