For Palestinians, It Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the Election There Next Week

By Staff, NYT

The “Israeli” entity is holding an election on Tuesday, and Palestinian communities in the occupied territories are not following it with much interest. This is not because whoever is elected will not have a strong impact on our lives. It’s because none of the leading candidates has a program for “peace”. The main contenders are committed to maintaining the illegal “Israeli” settlements that have been established in the West Bank. They do not seek to end the occupation.

The “Israeli” entity dictates that Palestinians can only watch from their homes the results of an election whose outcome will govern their lives and the future on their land, without even participating in the elections.

During the last “Israeli” election, in 2015, Palestinians in occupied Palestine had become less interested in the results of that race than in the prospect of filing various international legal cases. Hopes on the preparation of several claims to be brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague had been pinned on. One of them would challenge the construction of “Israeli” settlements in the occupied West Bank. There was no lack of evidence, and the transfer of civilians by a regime into territories it occupies is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.

Last month, the Trump administration also recognized the “Israeli” entity’s authority over the Golan Heights which “Israel” forcibly seized from Syria in 1967. This can only embolden the entity to eventually proceed with the formal annexation of the West Bank.

The “Israeli” entity, thanks to this support from the United States, now appears to be winning on all fronts, with impunity. And Palestinians seem too weak to stop it.

“Israelis”, for their part, seem to live under the illusion popularized by their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that their government can manage the conflict — that there is no need to actually resolve it. Yet over the span of Netanyahu’s premiership, the situation has gone from gloom to gloomier, from dark times to darker ones, from some measure of hope to despair.

Then again, at this point, maybe even darker would be better for Palestinians — maybe that’s the only way out. The one consolation for Palestinians watching the “Israeli” entity pursue its current path is to think that it is doing itself damage, too.

Consider three examples:

• Violence by “Israeli” settlers and right-wing activists against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank more than tripled last year, compared with 2017.

• An “Israeli” family built a unite on land taken away from Palestinians — and then tried to rent it out on Airbnb. When the company balked, citing a new policy announced late last year against listing properties in settlements, the family brought a case for discrimination in the United States. (The Palestinian family is suing back.)

• Last week, a family near the village of Hizma, north of al-Quds [Jerusalem], whose house is in an “Israeli” settlement, chose to destroy its home of more than three decades rather than paying “Israeli” authorities to do the job (and being fined).

Won’t “Israeli” society at some point also feel the nefarious effects of its government’s inhumanity toward Palestinians?

In Arundhati Roy’s novel “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” one of her characters, Musa, says that if Kashmiris have failed to gain independence from India, at least in struggling for it they have exposed the corruption of India’s system. Musa tells the book’s narrator, an Indian: “You’re not destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying.” Palestinians today might say the same of their struggle with the “Israeli” entity.