‘Look AT PALESTINE TODAY, surrounded by walls and watch towers surveyed by armed soldiers and tanks. It’s a vast prison! Why? Because they claim the right of any nation to their freedom! In 1948, the United Nations recognising the claims of both Jews and Arabs divided the country as best as possible, sixty years later Israel is a prosperous nation and Palestine lives in misery.’
‘But it was the Arabs who started the war in 1948.’
‘That’s clear, that was an error by the Arabs as was their later attacks, and they paid for it, losing the war and losing territory, but since peace treaties were signed with Egypt and Jordan there was no reason to prevent Palestine from achieving nationhood.’
‘What about Arafat, he prolonged the conflict with terror!’
‘Even if we forget the rest, Arafat has been dead for three years now, peace could have been made with Abbas.’
‘But the Palestinians have never abandoned their war.’
‘And Israel has never put a stop to the colonisation of Palestinian territories with the silent complicity of its citizens.’
‘Complicity?’
‘The IDF soldiers are the willing instruments of oppression, not forgetting the democratic peace Israelis from every walk of life, including historians and researchers of Nazism, the Holocaust and Soviet gulags?’
He was silent.
‘And there’s the expropriation of lands and destruction of farms for settlements and exclusively Jewish roads.’
‘What’s your position on Gaza?’
‘You think I approve the shelling and air attacks that kill the old and the young in the Gaza Strip? Or how sick people from Gaza are prevented from going for treatment on the West Bank.’
‘Perhaps people don’t realise what’s happening in Gaza.’
‘That’s the same defence the German’s used. Israelis ignore the fact that a short distance from where they live the army is vigorously oppressing the Palestinians, harassing them at checkpoints where thousands of people wait everyday for hours upon hours under the blazing sun.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘I’m dam sure I am, our country is a democracy for its Jews. Look at the democratically elected Palestinian prime minister, he cannot even visit the West Bank. It’s no wonder he accepts money from when Gaza is being deliberately strangled. Gaza is dying on its feet because of Bush, Blair and Europe!’
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The Legacy of Solomon
The Legacy of Solomon Page 79