There simply has to be a light at the end of our tunnel. Pressure is mounting as Israel still holds hostage huge amounts of our tax money. The United States has frozen its support money both to the Palestinian Authority and to Palestinian civil society, including the amounts allotted to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, and to East Jerusalem hospitals. To add insult to injury, the United States is flexing its muscles and doing its best to pressure other countries not to give financial support to Palestine. It has acknowledged Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and is almost the only country in the world that has moved its embassy to our future capital. Harassment at checkpoints, house demolitions, imprisonment of freedom fighters, and you name it continues unabated. UNTIL WHEN?
In the meantime, Palestinians are doing their utmost to evade an economic collapse or even the collapse of the Palestinian Authority itself. Palestinians await a miracle and keep hoping against hope. Our new prime minister has inherited an almost impossible situation, but should nothing change in terms of real improvement in people’s lives, I’m afraid people will hold him accountable. The situation is precarious, to put it mildly, and things could get out of hand any minute now. Should that happen, it would be an open Pandora’s Box where all, yes all, would lose.
In such an atmosphere, it’s probably silly to invoke a subjective notion like fairness. However, for the record, Palestinians are shouting out loud: “THIS IS UNFAIR.” A great Israeli journalist nailed it: How can a people that claims it has the right to return to its homeland three thousand years after leaving it refuse to recognize the right of another people who claims it has the right to return to its homeland seventy years after being expelled?
It’s simply political pressure; we all know that. But what “they” don’t know is that come what may, Palestinians cannot accept under any circumstances what is being proposed as a solution. The general attitude today? “If this is our Masada, then so be it.”