Now if you are a normal red-blooded human being you may be inclined to, at a minimum, grab hold of a few stones and lob them in the direction of your house.
Source/Credit: Khaleej Times
By Nadeem M Qureshi | July 17, 2014
Give the Palestinians the state your predecessors promised
People are perplexed. They ask why do you only blame Israel? What about the Palestinians who lob tens of rockets into Israel every day? These are good questions and they deserve answers.
It is like this: Suppose you live in a nice house. When you return from a day out you find that some other people have moved into your home. When you ask, they tell you this is not your home, it is theirs. So you go to the police for assistance. But at the station you are told that several millennia ago ancestors of these other people had a house in this location. They are just reclaiming what was originally theirs. And there is nothing the police can do.
Now if you are a normal red-blooded human being you may be inclined to, at a minimum, grab hold of a few stones and lob them in the direction of your house.
This is the crux of the Israel Palestine issue. Like it or not, the truth is that the state of Israel is built on land that belongs, and always has belonged to the Palestinians. No amount of immigration from remote parts of the world, no vague dubious references to the scriptures, no colonial declarations and no diplomatically expedient UN resolutions can change the truth.
The scale of the injustice done to the people of the land of Palestine has few parallels in human history. Yet they have taken it on the chin. The PLO was well within its rights to call for the return of all Palestinian land – after all it is their land. But the tide of history was not on their side. So they yielded, at the behest of the world’s greatest power acting as an honest broker, to accept a truncated but contiguous and sovereign state in which they would live with dignity and freedom. Sadly, the honest broker could not deliver on its promise.
We see on our TV screens alien troops armed to the teeth oppressing unarmed Palestinians in their own land. We see their humble, spartan homes being razed to the ground. We see their diminishing, crowded cities acquire the atmosphere of concentration camps complete with gun toting ‘settlers’ swaggering through their streets. And we say: Enough.
The tin can ‘rockets’ that are lobbed into Israel are a desperate attempt by a wronged people – a people whose screams we no longer hear - to tell the world that ‘we are here and we refuse to be forgotten’. So when Israel responds with insanely disproportionate force, people of conscience and justice recoil in anger and revulsion.
Benjamin Netanyahu, listen to their screams. Give the Palestinians their state before it is too late – not for them, but for you. Men, or women, in your position have, or at least should have, an eye on history. And history will tell you that colonisation never endures. So if you want your state to endure you must – for your sake – make your peace with the Palestinians. Today you need only give them that truncated contiguous state they were promised. Tomorrow, you may well have to give them the whole deal.
Barack Obama, I know that the American ethos is one of justice and fair play, of a keen sense of right and wrong. And I know, as well as you do, that the American people would never countenance the usurpation of other peoples land. Sadly, a carefully woven veil of lies and obfuscation has shrouded the normally clear and balanced vision of the American people. But they cannot be fooled forever – no one can.
Your opponents accuse you of inaction and indecisiveness. Show them that they are wrong. Give the Palestinians the state your predecessors promised them when they signed the peace accords. In doing so you will not only guarantee Israel’s survival, but earn for yourself a place in history as the President who said ‘Yes, we can’. And he did.
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Nadeem M Qureshi is the Chairman of Mustaqbil Pakistan
Read original post here: Perspective: The terror goes on
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