Gaza: Impoverished and Demolished by 38 Years of Brutal Military Occupation
While the media devoted huge amounts of coverage to the elections in Israel, with liberal commentators celebrating the power of Kadima as the new force for positive change...With everyone falling over themselves to agree on the wonderful harmony of Israeli public opinion in unilaterally setting the country's borders on Palestinian land...
And with an uncontested acceptance by the media of this pretty unique approach to negotiations, international law, military conquest and the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, Palestinians have had a different sort of week.
The mills ran out of flour in Gaza. A place that is continually extolled as "free" (as a result of the "Israeli pull-out" last year), and a triumph of this same Israeli unilateralism that we are about to see much more of, the Israeli military had actually locked up Gaza so tight that no trickle of humanitarian relief could get through.
Impoverished and demolished by 38 years of brutal military occupation, Palestinians were now being told they could starve.
This week Palestinian refugees in Iraq were fleeing for their lives and stuck on the border with Jordan, appealing to the international community, voiceless, unheeded, ignored.
Because Saddam Hussein had so often proclaimed for the cause of Palestine, Palestinian refugees are falsely assumed by some Iraqis to have received privileges from his regime; they received none.
Nearly forty thousand Palestinian refugees have been living in Iraq since their dispossession in 1948. Dragged into the engulfing tide of the engineered civil war, Palestinian refugees, with no documentation and no protection, are refugees again.
Thousands living in shelters in Baghdad, Palestinian schoolteachers have been lynched on the streets for being Palestinian, nearly a hundred are now on the border seeking refuge, whilst liberal commentators praise the party of Ariel Sharon, and his continuing legacy in the days to come.
This week Palestinian children were being shot and killed in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian political activists arrested (there is now more than 9,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails), Palestinian crops and farms were being destroyed.
Palestinians thrown out of their houses in Jerusalem, huge new checkpoints created at Kalandia that has made an insurmountable barrier between Palestinians within the West Bank, and with the continuation of the apartheid wall taking more land from villages.
For Palestinians, this week - like the week before it and the year before that - has been an act of war. The Israeli electorate are united in one thing only, and that is certainly not reconciliation with the Palestinians.
On the March 30 1976 Israeli security forces shot and killed six Palestinian citizens of Israel who were protesting against the expropriation of their land. Land Day, now in its 30th year, is a day of resistance and remembrance.
Thousands of olive trees will be planted in demonstrations all over occupied Palestine today, a timely reminder to the Israeli electorate, as well as to the media, of how to resolve this conflict.