“…it is essential if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In December 1988, Yasser Arafat recognized the existence of the State of Israel and engaged in a long and painful process of negotiations. Twenty years later, Israel has almost wiped Palestine and Palestinians literally off the map of the middle east.
The establishment of a “National Palestinian Authority” (NPA) has been a disaster for the Palestinian cause because it led to a division of the national Palestinian movement and to a bloody internal war between factions wanting to control an authority that doesn’t exist.
The day has come for the Palestinian liberation movement, namely the PLO, to declare a complete cessation of the NPA and to consider previous agreements made with Israel as Null and Void.
Resistance -non violent as I believe it is the most effective- is the only way left (as Le Monde Diplomatique‘s editorial reminds us), not only for Palestinians but for all the inhabitants of this dormant, lethargic and backward area in the world, called the Arab World.
Picture courtesy of “RomainGuy.”
Hisham Almiraat 
“The day has come for the Palestinian liberation movement, namely the PLO, to declare a complete cessation of the NPA ”
That would be a terrible act of cruelty against the Arabs of Palestine. Do you think they want to return to being occupied by Israel?
As for Le Monde Dip: they also got Iraq wrong. Once Iraqis and Americans teamed up to eliminate terrorists they accomplished the job fairly quickly and as of January 1st the independence of Iraq from occupation or tyranny has been restored, as it has not been for generations. Why should LMD be any more accurate now than it was a year ago?
“a terrible act of cruelty against the Arabs of Palestine…
“Do you think they want to return to being occupied by Israel?”
I’m not sure I’m following you on these. First of all it wouldn’t be any more cruel (for Arabs and non Arabs for that matter) to return to the resistance and the Intifada, which is a natural, inalienable right. Indeed the situation for the Palestinians can not be worse that the current one. Second of all : when did the Palestinians ever were free of occupation? It has never ceased but only increased in cruelty and viciousness with the almost declared goal of killing the hope (if not the lives)of the Palestinians and pushing them the leave by exhaustion.
As for Le Monde Diplomatique, I don’t know what are you talking about here? I wonder if you heard about the suicide bombing that has just claimed the lives of innocent Iraqis less than 24h ago? the situation is still as tense as one year ago and Tyranny has been replaced by a puppet government who serves as a cover for the occupation. Le Monde Diplomatique is a left leaning monthly, who takes strong and courageous positions on different issues; it’s my favourite French magazine, and if you don’t like it, don’t read it… as simple as that!
“return to the resistance and the Intifada, which is a natural, inalienable right. ”
Explain, please, what makes “resistance and intifada” a “natural, inalienable right.”
Imagine your land is being occupied by people who think they have right to your property because of some Divine promise… as if God was an estate agent. Imagine your people are being killed on a daily basis, their homes destroyed, their very existence denied… Don’t you think you would have the right to fight back… The Americans did it, the French did it, the South-Africans did it, the Algerians did it… Why won’t the Palestinians?
Never mind about the fact that international law recognizes the rights of the occupied, consider this just as a matter of human natural longing for freedom.
The Jews of Israel possess the arguments you have cited, and more; they have been rejected by the mass of humanity simply because they are Jews, so the best place for them is to return home, and for the Arab tribes who occupied their country to return to the embrace of their neighboring brothers and sisters.
Or do you think the Jews should be fighting to get Yathrib back?
Mind you Solomon: God is not an estate agent, and even if He were, that wouldn’t have given you the right to expropriate the inhabitants and owners of the place because contrary to your claim, and that of the Zionists like you, Palestine was not “a land without people, for people without a land.”
The central claim of your racist argument is baseless. If we put aside the idiotic argument you’re advancing (the somehow divine right for Jews to exclusively populate this land,) we’ll rapidly find that based on objective historic facts, Palestine has always been a land of transit, cultural mixing and interaction. Canaanites, Philistines, Samaritans, Nabataeans, Greeks, Egyptians, Hebrews, Arabs, Romans, Christians, Muslims and Jews. Tribes, then city states, kingdoms, empires were created for the purpose of the organization of growing human societies and management of the accumulating wealth; some would say religions were also created to temper and control the crowd. Those people have all cohabitated, not always peacefully, but shared the land, were surely not exclusive, but cross-married, interacted and hybridized. indeed, well before the first Hebrews set foot on the Land of Canaan as it was known anté biblical times, the place was controlled by the Pharaoh and populated by a collection of city-states and tribes of different ethnicities.
Why should one group of those get the exclusive supremacist right to rule over the land unless you subscribe as I suspect to the supremacist idea, that Israelis are some kind of a chosen people.
In the light of all that –and I think I have given you enough of my time- I see only one motive to your irrational (deliberately I suspect) claim, and that is RACISM. That’s the same mindset used by the fascist Nazis, who invented a whole lot of lies and systematic propaganda to demonize Jews, to better murder them and ended killing 6 million of them in gas chambers; an awful crime, coldly executed in a terrible frenzy of hatred and supremacist madness.
Is that what you’re reserving for Palestinians? Two wrongs have never made a right; no crime has ever justified another; nothing makes Israelis any more or exclusive victims than the Palestinians.
It’s a land with people, stolen by people with a plan as Ludwig Watzal, rightly put it (I invite you to read him by the way.)