The Palestinian issue: The bloody reality

It was in this holy land that the proverbial "An eye for an eye' originated, only to have added to it "... will make everyone blind". That seems to sum up the showcasing of firepower by the Israelis and Hamas in the Gaza this past week. The United Nations remained customarily impotent to stop the fighting and the USA, the pretentious ' honest broker' of peace in the region let the bloodletting go on until it had Egypt call for a truce.

It was a veritable David and Goliath clash in armed conflict, the Israelis with American air power and Hamas with long range ' sky- rockets'. Many Arab nations now only pay lip-service to the Palestinian cause, effectively split in their ranks by the Americans. Those not allied with the Americans, like Syria, are busy fighting their own internal insurgencies triggered by the US.

Sri Lanka, whose Prime Minister was the founder president of the local ‘ Solidarity with the Palestinians’ branch as a young MP was constrained to call for a two-state policy to the almost century- old Israeli- Palestinian issue, but fell short of condemning Israel with new equations in play in Sri Lanka’s relations with that country. It was a scorched earth policy unleashed by the Israelis against Hamas who were protesting the hegemony by Israel in expanding its real estate. The Palestinian Authority itself watched as mere bystanders the clashes unfolding, but the terrible reality is that the people of Palestine and their statehood will only get world attention when rockets keep flying.