The future of Palestine-Israel relationship remains misty.

Israel-Palestine Violence and conflict dates back to 100 years, when Britain took control of Palestine after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in world war one, who used to rule the region back then. The Palestinian land consisted of Arab majority and Jewish minority. 

Israel first or Palestine first?

Tension grew between the two parties as Britain was given a task by the international community to establish a “national home” in Palestine for Jewish people. The number of Jews arriving in the region also increased due to the persecution of Jews in Europe after the Holocaust which took place during world war two between 1920s and 1940s.

The land of Palestine has been claimed as a homeland by both the parties living on the land, Arabs claim that they have been living in the land for ages and their ancestors were inhabitants of the land, and Palestine existed before Israel came into existence while blaming Israel for suppressing the voices of Palestinian people through various techniques including censorship and internet shutdowns.

“Israel has established an apartheid regime across this territory. It has not done single-handedly, but with the complicity and protection of social media platforms, who have the choice to do the otherwise”, says Mariam Barghouti, a Palestinian rights activist, writer and researcher.

Whereas people from the Jewish community claim that their story and history dates back to four thousand years. “The land of Judea which was conquered by the Romans and majority of the Jewish people were displaced at the time but there was no point in history where there were no Jewish on the land of Palestine”, says Rudy Rochman, an Israeli-Jewish rights activist. 

The major event that took place in the history of the region was 1947, when the United Nations voted for Palestine to split it into separate Jewish and Arab entities, but the plan didn’t work out and in 1948 British rulers left the region and the Jewish leaders at that time declared the creation of Israeli state.

Nakba and the recent conflict

And then happened AL-NAKBA, the ‘catastrophe’ as the formation of Israeli state wasn’t agreed upon by Palestinians and Arab nations, this disagreement triggered the war forcing hundreds of Palestinians out of their homes. By the end of the war, Israel occupied most of the land, including the Jordan-occupied Palestine which is now known as West Bank. 

The region remains disturbed till today, the most recent and the ongoing conflict commenced on May 2021. On 6 May Palestinians in East Jerusalem protested against the decision of Israel’s Supreme court on the eviction of six Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah. On 10 May, Israeli police stormed al-Aqsa, injuring 300 Palestinians and 21 Israeli police. According to the Red Crescent, 250 Palestinians were hospitalized for injuries and seven were in critical condition.

Palestinians claim that this is an act of war crime and ethnic cleansing. “Displacement is a war crime and the Israeli Occupation has no legitimate jurisdiction over us under international law”, tweeted Muhammad El Kurd, a Palestinian activist.

On the contrary, Israeli officials say the Sheikh Jarrah issue is just “a real estate dispute”, and the settlers have the law on their side. “So, you know we have a property dispute that has been conflated into a political dispute in order to invent a provocation”, says Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, Jerusalem’s deputy mayor.

Ceasefire 

The ceasefire was announced on the 20^th of May, but the conflict of land continues. Recent conflict has caused hefty loss of life and property, where more than 250 Palestinians were killed because of Israeli airstrikes, and at least 12 were killed in Israel, as Hamas and other extremist groups, unleashed rocket attacks.

As the conflict continues, the future of Palestine-Israel relationship remains misty, and the Palestinians continue protesting for their rights and lands. Israel-Palestine are still quite far from finding a solution, but one thing which Palestine and Israel really need to consider is work on building up conversations and relationship to establish peace and stability in the region. 

Jaafar Siddiqui earned Bachelors in Journalism from the University of Hertfordshire — United Kingdom. He writes for The Milli Chronicle on Business, Politics, and Culture.

While the political and court dramas play out, Abu Diab says she and her sibling increasingly feel confined to the street.

For months the world has watched a political eviction drama unfold between Israeli settlers and Palestinian residents of a tiny barricaded road in East Jerusalem that has become a microcosm of the long-running conflict.

But while the cameras focus on the confrontations between police horses and protesters in Othman Ibn Afan Street, for 15-year-old Tala Abu Diab each day is a reminder that the quiet side street she grew up on has turned into a fear-filled obstacle course.

Twice a day the young Palestinian schoolgirl has to present her papers to the armed Israeli police stationed 24 hours a day at roadblocks both ends of her street, waiting for permission to go to and from her home.

“Our life is not a regular life anymore, I cannot go outside to see my friends nor can they come in to see me,” Abu Diab said.

“If they allow them in, which they rarely do, they stay for 30 minutes before clashes start to happen … so my friends have to leave the neighbourhood. That has affected me, I do not see people anymore except for family members.”

Israeli police say the roadblocks and restrictions are to prevent friction between Palestinians and Israeli settlers, who have already moved in to some of the homes on the street.

Those barriers were upgraded to concrete after a Palestinian motorist rammed into them at high speed a month ago. He was shot dead by the police stationed there, six of whom were injured.

The tension arises from a long-running court case in which Jewish settlers seek possession of Abu Diab’s home and others in a case that has drawn international attention and near-daily protests.

An Israeli court ruled in October in favour of settlers who say the Palestinian families are living on land that used to belong to Jews in territory that Israel captured in a 1967 war and later annexed in a move not recognised internationally.

The Palestinians, who question the legitimacy of the settlers’ documents, have appealed the ruling. Israel’s Supreme Court is expected to hear the case on Aug. 2.

While the political and court dramas play out, Abu Diab says she and her sibling increasingly feel confined to the street.

“It’s affected my mental health,” said Abu Diab, whose school is 15 minutes away. “If I leave, they harass me and when I come back, they harass me. It is very hard.”

Hamas is not fighting for a human rights cause; they are committing war crimes to boost their political standing.

I was born in the Jordanian-occupied Old City in Jerusalem and lived in a UN refugee camp from 1966 until 1999. During the First Intifada, I worked for B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and in 1996 I founded the Jerusalem-based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring group. With my background in Palestinian campaigning and as a resident of East Jerusalem today, you might assume that I am against Israel’s current military actions. But this could not be further from the truth. The blame for this month’s bloodshed lies solely at the feet of Hamas.

Those who wish to divert attention from Hamas’s war crimes would like to blame the latest conflict on a complicated legal dispute in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. But this was a private matter between Jews who have a property deed from the 1800s and the residents of four homes who have refused to pay rent. This cannot be framed as ‘ethnic cleansing’. It is little more than a landlord-tenant squabble. It should have been a matter for the local courts, but instead this small-time event wound up in an appeal at the supreme court, and hit the press. Hamas quickly saw an opportunity.

Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Fatah party, is at his weakest point in many years. He had just cancelled parliamentary elections because he knew he would lose. Hamas saw Sheikh Jarrah as an opportunity to show Palestinians in Jerusalem and elsewhere that they could ‘do something’ while Fatah could not. They spread lies and propaganda on social media, deliberately inciting violence among Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Hamas then ‘responded’ to the riots by firing rockets indiscriminately towards Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, guaranteeing an Israeli military response. Hamas is not fighting for a human rights cause; they are committing war crimes to boost their political standing.

Hamas does not care where these missiles land: as many as one in seven, in fact, have been reported by the Israel Defence Forces to have crashed down within Gaza during this latest round of fighting, resulting in 20 casualties. They see a lopsided body count as a positive development, as it allows them to claim that Israel is the aggressive party in the conflict they started. This Islamist terror group is dangerous for our people: we cannot continue to be a conduit for their work.

Hamas is not fighting for a human rights cause; they are committing war crimes to boost their political standing.

A recent video showed the Hamas leadership celebrating missile launches from a party in Qatar. These people are out of harm’s way. They leave their foot soldiers, often young and desperate men with no employment prospects, to launch the attacks from residential buildings. We recently saw an Israeli strike on a tower that housed Al Jazeera, AP, and other news outlets. According to Israeli sources, Hamas maintained military intelligence offices in the building and had previously launched attacks from that exact location, using the foreign media as human shields. The Israeli intelligence was enough for the Americans to accept the strike head of the event. ‘We showed them the smoking gun proving Hamas worked out of that building,’ a senior diplomatic source told the Jerusalem Post. ‘I understand they found the explanation satisfactory.’

You never would have heard about this in the western media though, because the reporting out of Gaza is not honest. Hamas tightly controls all press access and foreign media have the choice of reporting the news the way Hamas tells them to, or not being allowed into Gaza at all. Almost all of them choose the former.

Palestinians are forced to choose between the corrupt, ineffectual Fatah and the fanatical, genocidal Hamas. Of course, this is largely an academic debate. There is no real ‘choice’ – there has not been an election in 15 years. But there is another, more pressing issue than the depressing state of our current leadership: the refusal to recognise the reality that Israel and the Jews are here to stay.

Seventy-three years have passed since Israel was established. Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates all understand that Israel is not a temporary stain on the map, but a permanent feature of the Middle East. Unfortunately many Arabs, including most Palestinians, still deny this obvious truth.

Obsessing over the Israeli-Palestinian issue has been a disaster for the Arab world: it has held back our development for generations and cost the Palestinian people dearly. Israel is still here – and isn’t going anywhere. The Arab world is large and there is plenty of room for all of us. We have been blessed with natural resources that could provide bountiful opportunities. Instead of focusing our wealth and talent on creating a better life for us, our leaders have spent decades fighting Israel. It is long past time for all Arabs to stop wasting resources trying to conquer a tiny country that we will never defeat. Only then will we have peace and prosperity.

Article first published in Spectator.uk.

Bassem Eid is a Palestinian human rights expert, political analyst, commentator, and journalist, based in Jerusalem. He tweets under @eid_bassem.