Parks Canada downplays crisis
Dear Editor:
What does the Israeli government want to happen to Palestinians when it finished its war on Gaza? Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has rejected a Palestinian state.
Offering Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians is not likely, because they would have the same rights as Israelis to lease land and could claim protection against harassment and confiscation of their land by other Israeli citizens. If Israel occupies Gaza again, it would be responsible for rebuilding the territory it is now destroying, paying for food, rebuilding hospitals, providing medicine, fuel,, education and so on. Either full citizenship or full responsibilities of a occupying state would require the kind of generosity Israel has been unwilling to show.
Or is the unstated hope of the Netanyahu rightwing war cabinet that the Palestinians in Gaza and occupied territories should “voluntarily” move to other countries? However, this would breach Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which forbids deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or part.
The two state solution has been the Holy Grail of peace since the 1993 Oslo Accord, which is about ownership. The accord gave the Palestinians interim autonomy in Gaza and parts of the occupied West Bank. Under the accord Israel and Palestinian were meant to negotiate “final status issues” to make the temporary accord permanent, but the offer by Israel to the Palestinians fell short of what Yasser Arafat could accept and survive politically.
Initially, Arafat made his first and ultimately last concession, by conceding that Palestinians would reside on 22% of the land, but Israel unsatisfied wanted another 9% of the West Bank. The deal collapsed into the second intifada (20002005), with suicide bombers and shooting attacks against Israel, this doomed the dance between occupier and occupied that was the Oslo Accord and it could never get back on track.
During the Oslo accord process, the number of Jewish settlers in occupied territories increased from 250,000 in 1993 to 400,000 in 2003. 1n 2005 Israel left Gaza and to the existing fence built an enhanced 7 meter concrete wall with remote controlled machine guns and barbwire. A weakened Palestinian Authority ultimately lost control to Hamas and years of Israel’s intransience led to the current situation today.
Jon Peter Christoff West Kelowna