Life in the West Bank: An Introduction

In many articles I have stressed the point of the Israeli occupation being unbearable. But as many times as I write it, I cannot give this point justice. Writing it is one thing and experiencing it is a another, however thank God I've never experienced it. The most important thing right understand is that the West Bank is not wholly Palestinian. It is in ownership, but not in population. This piece of land, west of the Jordan River, is cut up into many fragments. The reason being the Israeli military presence, and the Jewish settler population. These are both illegal, along with the rest of the aspects of occupation. Yet Israel is the only colonial power left in the whole world. Why does it occupy this piece of land? The answer to this question is that it captured it in the 1967 War, yet it would have given it up for a peace process. The Israeli government, however, is not willing to withdraw, because it thinks that this is their rightful claim, and to occupy is the only answer currently. They want to keep sending in settlers, and building settlement upon settlement on confiscated property from the Palestinians. Yet the world tends to ignore this, because Israel is going through with its plans to make it seem to the international community that nothing new is happening.

Yet every single day, something new is happening. This includes the constant settlement building, and checkpoints to the smallest details, which the world tends to ignore, such as the daily harassment of the Jewish settlers to Palestinians. These details are multiplying, and are spreading like an infection. Soon the whole West Bank, will not be under military occupation, but will be annexed to Israel, and the Palestinians will still be denied citizenship, or they will expel the Palestinians as they did in 1948 and will be rid of the "demographic problem".

There are many small aspects that should be brought to the world's attention concerning this occupation, and in the articles to come, all of this will be revealed, and then you can judge.

Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza: Unchanged

You look ahead: blue skies, blue seas, and destruction. Utter destruction. That is the case in Gaza. All around you there is destruction and chaos. Children in the streets playing. The sewage line is in the civilian streets. Elderly people sit on the ground and pray to God to help them get out of this catostrophe.
It is in all means a catostrophe, nothing else. The recent Gaza Offensive, Cast Lead, as it was called by the Israeli Government and IDF destroyed what little infrastucture Gaza had. On top of all of that, Israel blames Hamas for bringing it on itself. The United States, and most of the European Union believes so too, yet the truth is in the eyes of every Gazan, that made it through the hellish three weeks, alive. Since the catostrophe, as I will refer to it, nothing has changed. The United Nations even said so. Nothing will change anyway if these ridiculous blockades are not lifted. 80% of the people in Gaza rely on relief agencies such as UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works agency for Palestinian refugees) for their survival, just survival, which means food and water. How is any humanitarian aid going to get through to Gaza if all the borders are closed most of the time, and there is simply not enough time for all the UN trucks to pass in. Israel has these borders closed, and is even denying the presence of a humanitarian aid! What a lie, a filthy lie, to deny anything ever happening to these people. I don't know what's going to happen now, but I'm sure the United Nations won't get anything done. What has it done throughout all of these occupations? It sets hundreds of resolutions, yet all of these are ignored by the State of Israel which thinks it is above International Law. I'm going to have a hard time believing that anything will change now, even if the United Nations is aware of what is happening. Maybe it'll pass yet another resolution, like the countless ones before it, and just like the countless ones before it, it will be jotted down in their historical archives, ignored and tucked away.

Settler Withdrawal from Gaza: Why It Happened

In a very well thought out move, Israel siginified to the world that it was a democratic state and is not willing to occupy captured territories from 1967. In 2005, the Israeli government withdrew its settler population from the Gaza Stip, which was about 5,000 people. By doing this, the Gaza strip was left tot he Palestinians to govern. The international society looks at this as a step leading up to a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, however it is very far from that.
With the Gaza Strip free of all Jewish and Israeli settlers and safe in Israel, the Israeli government transformed Gaza: the heavily and densely populated civilian area ino its own military "laboratory". No obstacles remain in the face of this government, because the Palestinians can hardly be regarded as humans, or living things in their eyes. Palestinians meant nothing to Israel, only a waste of space.
With the transformation of Gaza into this laboratory, Israel can test all of its latest technologies on the civilian population. It created horrors on this little piece of land, horrors that ended in chaos, poverty, death, and destruction. Along with the constant "experiments" Israel has also put a blockade on Gaza that will result in a humanitarian crisis that Israel and the United States would deny fully (but that will be a whole different article).
The most important thing to know now, is that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, did not mean peace or friendliness. It meant that they wanted their population to be safe, and to bestow upon the 1.5 million Palestinians terror that will end in many consequences. At the same time they refuse to them the basic necissties of living, such as food, and clean water, and such. This whole withdrawal triggered a number of events, such as the recent Gaza offensive, Cast Lead.
The Israeli Government should not hide behind the excuse of withdrawal and an end to the occupation in Gaza because that is a lie. Nothing justifies the horrors that these people are experiencing and these are war crimes! In articles to come, I will reveal the day to day terrorizing events the Palestinians endured.

IDF Admits War Crimes in Gaza

For the past couple of days, Ha'aretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, has been publishing first hand accounts from IDF soldiers in the Gaza offensive. These accounts reveal the war crimes that have been committed and the injustice that the Palestinians in Gaza had to suffer in that three-week long offensive.
I thought it was about time the Israelis started to reveal this treachery. For example, several papers have been retrieved from Palestinian homes, that were written by IDF commanders, ordering their troops to shoot at civilians, and rescue workers (from the Red Crescent and others). The Palestinians were either left inside their homes, waiting for rescue, or were dead because the IDF were preventing their evacuation. And to justify the evidence found in the homes of various Gazans is an IDF reserve officer that did not take part in the operation. He says that this note may have been written by a low-level commander.
Ha'aretz also admits that brutality of the Gaza offensive. IDF soldiers storming into houses, expelling the residents, and using the Palestinian house as means of safety and for shooting positions. Another article that was published a couple of days ago in Ha'aretz also stated that the IDF commanders ordered their soldiers to shoot at anyone in their way. The soldiers had to obey and they did as they were told. A Palestinian woman and her children was exiting her house so she could find a safe haven. The IDF soldier told her to go right, yet she didn't understand and went left. The cost of that small mistake was her life and the lives of her children.
The treachery of this offensive was known to many, but finally the Israelis are admitting to it. These troops of no humanity in them. They are heartless and that is the reason they were able to kill so much innocent civilians.

Israel's Excuse for War

Israel, always "acting in defense of its citizens" has a lot of different tactics to spark war in the region. One of them being to push the surrounding Arab countries to the limits of their patience, until they say enough and resort to violence. In response, Israel launches an all out war, and the IDF destroys anything in their way, being houses or innocent children. Let's take the example of the 1967 Six Day War. The start of this war was not in June, but in April, two months before the official Six Day War. Israeli Settlers were advancing deeper and deeper into the heart of the Golan Heights in Syria and they were plowing land, in an area known as the demilitarized zone. The Israeli government was pushing these people further and further. And this strategy was well thought out beforehand. They wanted a reaction from the Syrian Government, they wanted them to shoot at the Israeli Settlers and that's exactly what happened. Because in this situation, there are only two choices the Syrian government could take, and only one choice to defend Syrian land. If they didn't shoot, the Israeli Settlers would advance more and more and settle in Syria, just like they are currently in the West Bank. But they did shoot, and the Israelis launched a disproportionate offensive. This is what Israel's Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan said at the time to the New York Times, "If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also". So the Israeli Defense Minister at the time, said it himself, that this advancement of settlers was to trigger a reaction from the Syrians, and in response Israel would be justified to attack Syria, as an "Act of Defense for the Israeli Citizens". And they did exactly that, causing heavy Syrian casualties as well as the shooting down of several planes over the city of Damascus. These are their tactics, provocation, violence, and lies. And this cycle will never end. We saw it just recently with the Gaza offensive. Israel blockades, Hamas shoots rockets, and Israel announces a war "to ensure the safety of the citizens of the State of Israel", and kills around a thousand and a half people in the process. And I don't have to mention the state of destruction the Gaza strip is in right now, and all of that just for home made rockets being launched and barely killing 5 people and doing any damage. Israel's disproportionate offensives and attacks will never end. The world witnessed in 2006 how Israel bombed Rafik al Hariri International Airport in Beirut, Lebanon. Why, because Hezbollah imprisoned two Israeli soldiers and won't release them, in comparison with the hundreds of innocent war prisoners in Israel. Not only did it bomb the airport, but this whole issue became a month long war that destroyed a portion of Beirut. So before the world points fingers at the Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries, they should recognize what Israel had done, what it is doing, and what it will do in the near future.

Israel's Disproportionate "Retaliations"

Much of the time, the Western World, and the United States most importantly, persuade themselves that what Israel is doing, and all the attacks and offensives that take place are a reaction to Palestinian violence and attacks. Let's take the example of the Gaza Offensive, which just ended a little over a month ago. Because of the rockets that Hamas was launching into Israel, Israel decided that it was enough and attacked the small, yet heavily populated Gaza Strip, first from the air and then on foot. Yet the Israeli government, or the world at that matter, never asks why they started attacking Israel in the first place. Maybe it was resistance to the occupation, but in my opinion it was an outcry to the ridiculous blockade that Israel has cast on all the Gaza strip. It controls what comes in and what goes out. There is barely any food, no electricity, no clean water. What could the Palestinians do other than launch rockets. I see these rockets as flares, fireworks that get the attention of the population around them. They were used as signals of desperate and immediate help, just like the sinking Titanic used flares to signal to ships in the distance. After this "Act of Defense for the safety of the Israeli people" was over, the result would be the slaughter of about 1,300 people and more than a fourth of these victims are innocent women and children. When the world confronts the Israeli government with this information, all it can say is "Hamas is using innocent civilians as human shields". If I were to ask the Israeli government to explain what they mean, they would say that "Hamas is hiding in heavily populated areas to get the sympathy of the world when there is a huge number of casualties". However, where can the ruling group of an area live, or hide in that matter. Gaza is one of the most heavily populated areas in the world, with about 1.5 million people living there. I won't deny the "Acts of Humanity" that Israel has done by releasing flyers to the Gazans reading "We Will Destroy Your Home Tomorrow, Go Somewhere Safe". But where is safety? Where is safety in a strip that barely measures 139 square miles that is bombarded by white phosphorous and other lethal bombs every two minutes. Where is the family that just received this flyer going to go? Out on the streets, where it's even more dangerous due to the land offensive, because there is no way out of the Gaza Strip. This is what Tzipi Livni said "We are not telling them to go out of Gaza, we are just telling them to go to a safer place in Gaza". As if the poor innocent families had a copy of the IDF's agenda on what to destroy next.