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In November 2007, the Annapolis Conference was hailed as a "historic opportunity" with an agreement to start negotiations aimed at reaching a final accord on an independent Palestinian state by the end of 2008. Since then, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators began "getting down to business and meeting frequently to achieve an agreement." However, on the ground in 2008, the Palestinians are actually the farthest from peace and from the promise of a Palestinian state.
In 2008, the occupation has been completing the apartheid wall. It has continued with more settlements, more checkpoints, more economic blockades, and more oppression. As the end of the year approaches, the end game of the "peace process" becomes clear: a war on Gaza waged by Israel but also supported by the international community, the governments of some Arab states, and the minority of Palestinians who agreed to be subcontractors for the occupation and received training by US generals Keith Dayton and James Jones.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas will stay in office after his term ends in January 2009. He counts on an amended law that makes the presidential and parliamentary elections take place in unison, but this amendment was never ratified by any constitutional body.
The Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) appointed Abbas as president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), and Arab foreign ministers decided during their meeting in November 2008 to second the PLO decision.
Abbas is entitled to appoint members of the PLO Central Council, and these are entitled to appoint him as president! This is the deceiving cycle of democracy that the world wishes on us. Unfortunately, we do not have only the cycle of violence.
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While the world and some Palestinians were sleeping and dreaming of peace, the Israelis were only preparing for war and planning to devour more Palestinian land and rights. According to a report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there were more settler attacks on Palestinians during 2008, compared with 2007 and 2006.
Many settlers and supporters of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank have come to senior posts in the Israeli occupation forces. They hold key offices in the civil administration as well. Ze'ev Braude, 51, is a settler from the Jewish settlement Kiryat Arba in the West Bank. He was caught on film as he was shooting at two Palestinians at close range, and he was sent back home.
As the occupation is soft on settlers, the out for "special treatment" by both the EU and the US. Unlike other countries in the surrounding region, Israel has been allowed to develop nuclear weapons, and has not been held to account for ignoring UN Security Council resolutions.
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It was also in this year of "peace" that Israeli mobs launched attacks on the Palestinians living in the city of `Akka after a Palestinian man drove through a Jewish neighborhood on Yom Kippur. The Israeli authorities just let this happen.
While the occupation is being soft on settlers, the international community is also being soft on Israel. Israel has always been singled out for "special treatment" by both the EU and the US. Unlike other countries in the surrounding region, Israel was allowed to develop nuclear weapons. It has never been held to account for ignoring many resolutions of the UN Security Council.
The US vetoed many UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel's blatant violations of human rights and grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which sets out the rights of peoples under foreign occupation.
Under a partnership agreement, despite the recurrent violations of human rights in the occupied territories, the EU governments and the union's executive, the European Commission, still refuse to cut trade with Israel. Instead, they suspended direct aid to the PNA in 2006, when Hamas won the parliamentary elections.
Today, the EU's decision to focus its support on the West Bank rather than Gaza helps to divide the Palestinian people, thus making their national agenda weaker. The EU did nothing to lift the restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, though it has operated a border assistance mission in Rafah.
Following each disaster, the US and EU always paid the costs of reconstruction and repaired the civilian infrastructure, including the schools and hospitals destroyed by Israel. They never asked Israel to pay the bill. The world has allowed Israel to ignore its responsibilities imposed by the international law.
While Israel was preparing for a war on Gaza, the UN was paving the road for another year of deception. The UN Security Council passed its first resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in five years, endorsing the so-called Bush's vision of "two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security."
Is the UN thinking that Israel will honor another UN resolution? The treatment of UN human rights investigator Richard Falk is recent evidence of how Israel regards the UN. Days after calling the Israeli blockade of Gaza a crime against humanity, Falk was detained and then expelled from Ben Gurion Airport.
The Palestinians need no more UN resolutions; they need to see the UN's role in enforcing the previous ones, just as other UN resolutions were enforced with many states for much less serious violations.
In late December 2008, a poll commissioned by the Hebrew University's Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace found that almost 60 percent of Israelis oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders, with a division of Jerusalem and an agreed solution to the refugee problem.
Ironically, a Peace Index poll conducted by Tel Aviv University's Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research found that more than 70 percent of Israelis favor continuing the negotiations. This shows how misleading negotiations can be.
Hamas is a popular movement that has a strong presence among the Palestinians. Decent and fair elections brought Hamas to power. The Palestinians knew that they could not go to negotiations without their resistance. Therefore, Israel and the world set three unjust conditions to tamper with what Hamas had been elected for: Hamas must recognize the right of Israel to exist; Hamas must abandon "violence"; Hamas must accept all previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements .
Since the election of Hamas, one and a half million civilians have been put under siege because they had chosen to vote for the "wrong people," according to Israel. The Israeli siege imposed on Gaza has starved hundreds of thousands to extort their submission and subdue their resistance, so that the Palestinian negotiators would have nothing to negotiate.
In return for the calm, Israel was rationing the inhabitants of Gaza during the siege., if one were a cancer patient in Gaza, he or she would not be able to receive interventional radiology outside the boarders. However, this did not turn the Gazans against resistance factions.
Now, the war on Gaza is waged to bring the resistance factions down once and for all, after the failure of international boycott, Dayton's plan of sewing the seeds of inter-Palestinian strife, and Israel's blockade. But, like other punitive measures, this war is destined to have a reverse effect. The resistance factions will survive. They will live forever in the hearts of Palestinians and inspire the free and progressive people of the world as a symbol of survival of truth in the face of imperialist deception.
The Israelis are supposedly clever people, but how come they do not understand that military solutions are of no avail when the target is a stateless people? Not only will the war on Gaza fail to stop the Palestinian homemade rockets but also it will weaken Israel's ability to protect itself from the "already neutralized" Palestinians.
The process of concealing information and purposely misinforming the international public opinion about the true plans the West has for this region is nothing but deception. As peoples worldwide look forward to a peaceful new year, they are reminded that wars can be won by deception. Niccol? Machiavelli meant war when he advised the Prince, "Never attempt to win by force what can be won by fraud." In fact, modern-day imperialists know this advice very well.
The Palestinians have endured many difficulties. They have always been able to survive, protect their identity, and maintain their hope for a better future. The Israeli attempt to dominate the Palestinians by massive power will fail, and Gaza will be a trap for the Israeli soldiers — a burden that will not be carried without moral degradation, shame, eventual failure, and collapse of Zionism.
The Israeli bombs can tear the bodies of Palestinian children, women, and men into pieces. They can bring buildings and entire towns to the ground. But they cannot change the hearts and souls of the faithful. The Palestinians are a faithful people; they will survive this war too.
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