Human Rights Crime in Gaza
Appeasement Shames Us All | 07.05.2008 20:21 | Anti-racism | World
As these articles prove, the world knows precisely what is going on in Gaza.
By any name you call it, Gaza is a territory under Israeli siege, Collective Punishment which is causing incredible hardship, and death, for Gazan Palestinians.
Every country in the world should immediately, stop any and all aid to Israel until this siege stops.
As Jewish groups increasingly speak out against Israel and Zionist Extremism, the pressure to reverse the pressure applied by the 'Israel Lobby', which falsely claims to speak for the greater Jewish community, increases, as does the possibility of international action on Israeli Apartheid.
By any name you call it, Gaza is a territory under Israeli siege, Collective Punishment which is causing incredible hardship, and death, for Gazan Palestinians.
Every country in the world should immediately, stop any and all aid to Israel until this siege stops.
As Jewish groups increasingly speak out against Israel and Zionist Extremism, the pressure to reverse the pressure applied by the 'Israel Lobby', which falsely claims to speak for the greater Jewish community, increases, as does the possibility of international action on Israeli Apartheid.
A human rights crime in Gaza
Jimmy Carter
May 6, 2008
The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world by sea, air, or land. An entire population is being brutally punished.
This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.
Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who lived in the West Bank are now imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional ten who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.
Regardless of one’s choice in the partisan struggle between Fatah and Hamas within occupied Palestine, we must remember that economic sanctions and restrictions in delivering water, food, electricity, and fuel are causing extreme hardship among the innocent people in Gaza, about one million of whom are refugees.
Israeli bombs and missiles periodically strike the encapsulated area, causing high casualties among both militants and innocent women and children. Prior to the highly publicized killing of a woman and her four little children last week, this pattern was illustrated by a previous report from B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organization: 106 Palestinians were killed between February 27 and March 3. Fifty-four of them were civilians who didn't take part in the fighting, and 25 were under 18 years of age.
On a recent trip through the Middle East, I attempted to gain a better understanding of the crisis. One of my visits was to Sderot, a community of about 20,000 in southern Israel that is frequently struck by rudimentary rockets fired from nearby Gaza. I condemned these attacks as abominable and an act of terrorism, since most of the thirteen victims during the past seven years have been non-combatants.
Subsequently, I met with leaders of Hamas, both a delegation from Gaza and the top officials in Damascus, Syria. I made the same condemnation to them, and urged that they declare a unilateral ceasefire or orchestrate with Israel a mutual agreement to terminate all military action in and around Gaza for an extended period.
They responded that such previous action by them had not been reciprocated, and they reminded me that Hamas had previously insisted on a ceasefire throughout Palestine including both Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel had refused. Hamas then made a public proposal of a mutual ceasefire restricted to Gaza, which the Israelis considered and also rejected.
There are fervent arguments heard on both sides concerning blame for a lack of peace in the Holy Land. Israel has occupied and colonized the Palestinian West Bank, which is approximately one-fourth (28.5%) the size of the nation of Israel as recognized by the international community. Some Israeli religious factions claim a right to the land on both sides of the Jordan River, and others aver that their 205 settlements with some 500,000 people are necessary for "security."
All Arab nations have agreed to full recognition of Israel if it will comply with key United Nations resolutions. Hamas has agreed to accept any negotiated peace settlement between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, provided it is approved in a referendum among the Palestinian people.
This holds promise of progress, but despite the brief fanfare and positive statements at the peace conference last November in Annapolis, Maryland, a retrogression has occurred in the process. Nine thousand new Israeli settlement housing units have been announced in Palestine, the number of roadblocks within the West bank has increased, and the stranglehold on Gaza has been tightened.
It is one thing for other leaders to defer to the US on the crucial peace negotiations, but the world must not stand idle while innocent people are treated cruelly. It is time for strong voices in Europe, the US, Israel, and elsewhere to speak out and condemn this human rights tragedy among the Palestinian people.
Jimmy Carter, a former President of the United States, is founder of The Carter Center, promoting peace, health, and human rights worldwide. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m43798&hd=&size=1&l=e
No Middle East Peace Without Tough Love
By Henry Siegman
25/04/08 "Al-Hayat" -- - We now have word that Tony Blair, envoy of the Middle East Quartet (the UN, the EU, Russia and the United States), and German Chancellor Angela Merkel intend to organize yet another peace conference, this time in Berlin in June. It is hard to believe that after the long string of failed peace initiatives, stretching back at least to the Madrid conference of 1991, statesmen and stateswomen are recycling these failures without seemingly having a clue as to why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is even more hopeless today than before these peace exercises first got underway.
The scandal of the international community's impotence in resolving one of history's longest bloodlettings is that it knows what the problem is but does not have the courage to speak the truth, much less deal with it. The next peace conference in Germany (or in Moscow, where the Russians want to hold it) will suffer from the same gutlessness that has marked all previous efforts. It will deal with everything except the problem primarily responsible for this conflict's multi-generational impasse.
That problem is that for all of the sins attributable to the Palestinians - and they are legion, including inept and corrupt leadership, failed institution-building and the murderous violence of the rejectionist groups-there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state primarily because Israel's various governments, from 1967 until today, have never intended allowing such a state to come into being.
It is one thing if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a Palestinian state until certain Israeli security concerns were dealt with. But no government that is serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued without let-up the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands that even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible.
Given the overwhelming disproportion of power between the occupier and the occupied, it is hardly surprising that Israeli governments and their military and security establishments found it difficult to resist the acquisition of Palestinian land. What is astounding is that the international community, pretending to believe Israel's claim that it is the victim and its occupied subjects the aggressors, has allowed this devastating dispossession to continue and the law of the jungle to prevail.
As long as Israel knows that by delaying the peace process it buys time to create facts on the ground that will prove irreversible, and that the international community will continue to indulge Israel's pretense that its desire for a two-state solution is being frustrated by the Palestinians, no new peace initiative can succeed, and the dispossession of the Palestinian people will indeed become irreversible.
There can be no greater delusion on the part of Western countries weighed down by guilt about the Holocaust than the belief that accommodating such an outcome would be an act of friendship to the Jewish people. The abandonment of the Palestinians now is surely not an atonement for the abandonment of European Jewry seventy years ago, nor will it serve the security of the State of Israel and its people.
John Vinocur of the New York Times recently suggested that the virtually unqualified declarations of support for Israel by Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are "at a minimum an attempt to seek Israeli moderation by means of public assurances with this tacit subtext: these days, the European Union is not, or is no longer, its reflexive antagonist." But the expectation that uncritical Western support of Israel would lead to greater Israeli moderation and greater willingness to take risks for peace is blatantly contradicted by the conflict's history.
Time and again, this history has shown that the less opposition Israel encounters from its friends in the West for its dispossession of the Palestinians, the more uncompromising its behavior. Indeed, Olmert's reaction to Sarkozy's and Merkel's expressions of eternal solidarity and friendship have had exactly that result: Olmert approved massive new construction in East Jerusalem- authorizing housing projects that were frozen for years by previous governments because of their destructive impact on the possibility of a peace agreement-as well as continued expansion of Israel's settlements. And Olmert's defense minister, Ehud Barak, declared shortly after Merkel's departure that he will remove only a token number of the more than 500 checkpoints and roadblocks that Israel has repeatedly promised, and just as repeatedly failed, to dismantle.
That announcement shattered whatever hope Palestinians may have had for recovery of their economy as a consequence of the seven billion dollars in new aid promised by the international donor community in Paris last December. In these circumstances, the donor countries, not to speak of the private sector, will not pour good money after bad, as they so often have in the past.
So what is required of statesmen is not more peace conferences or clever adjustments to previous peace formulations, but the moral and political courage to end their collaboration with the massive hoax the
peace process has been turned into. Of course, Palestinian violence must be condemned and stopped, particularly when it targets civilians. But is it not utterly disingenuous to pretend that Israel's occupation-maintained by IDF-manned checkpoints and barricades, helicopter gunships, jet fighter planes, targeted assassinations and military incursions, not to speak of the massive theft of Palestinian lands-is not itself an exercise in continuous and unrelenting violence against more than 3 million Palestinian civilians? If Israel were to renounce violence, could the occupation last even one day?
Israel's designs on the West Bank are not much different than the designs of the Arab forces that attacked the Jewish state in 1948 - the nullification of the international community's partition resolution of 1947. Short of addressing the problem by its right name-something that is of an entirely different order than hollow statements that "settlements do not advance peace"-and taking effective collective action to end a colonial enterprise that disgraces what began as a noble Jewish national liberation struggle, further peace conferences, no matter how well intentioned, make their participants accessories to one of the longest and cruelest deceptions in the annals of international diplomacy.
Henry Siegman, director of the US/Middle East Project in New York, is research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Siegman is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.
The near impossibility of a Mideast peace
By Eran Yashiv Published: May 6, 2008
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TEL AVIV: With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visiting Israel this week and President George W. Bush expected next week, talks about peace between Israel and the Palestinians are on the agenda yet again.
This elusive peace is widely proclaimed as both essential and achievable. But while the former is true and desirable, the latter is a widespread misperception. The solution to the conflict exists and is well known, but it cannot be implemented in the foreseeable future.
Many policymakers and commentators believe a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli problem is possible for several reasons: First, rational people believe in rational solutions; second, the conflict is deemed "too important" not to have some resolution; third, the outlines of such a rational solution have been drawn time and again, so that the mere existence of a solution encourages belief in its implementation.
Over the past 12 years, four plans have offered a similar formula based on the establishment of two states. Indeed, the declaration issued at the end of the recent Annapolis conference builds on this logic.
So why should a rational solution have little hope of being achieved? Because there are serious disincentives to making peace that have to do with demographics, the intensity of violence and economics.
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Moreover, feedback mechanisms in operation reinforce the disincentives. Consider demographics: The median age of Palestinians is 17 years. Compared to a median age of about 37 years in the United States and 30 in Israel, the Palestinians are a very young nation.
A staggering 85 percent of the Palestinian population is under 40, and so was born under Israeli occupation, which began in June 1967. More than 40 percent of the Palestinians experienced the second intifada, or uprising, against Israel as infants or children. These facts mean that the majority of the population has experienced Israel only as an occupying force, within an increasingly violent environment.
More than 4,300 Palestinians have been killed in the past decade alone. The number of injured or traumatized Palestinians is in the tens of thousands. Given that it is very difficult to alter one's perception of the world formed in childhood, the probability that Palestinians will become more favorable toward Israelis is really nonexistent.
In an illuminating interview in The New York Times Magazine last year with a Hamas activist, Steven Erlanger quoted the man as saying, "I think this generation will be the liberation generation. If in the past, 1 percent of the people went into resistance, from this generation, 20 percent or more will do it. . . This generation will be our liberation army."
Potent feedback mechanisms reinforce these disincentives for peace. One has to do with the economic situation. Since 1999 the Palestinian economy has shrunk by about a third in per capita terms. The rate of unemployment has risen from 14 percent to 22 percent in the period 2000-2005, with recent numbers indicating high double-digit figures in Gaza.
The percentage of people below the poverty line has increased from 20 percent in the second half of the 1990s to over 40 percent, with approximately 15 percent classified as living in deep poverty.
This situation is a breeding ground for those who wish to buy influence through economic aid. One such group is Hamas, which built its political success on charity. Others include Iran and Al Qaeda.
Indeed, an adviser to the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, proclaimed in January 2007 that Hamas had received pledges of about a billion dollars from the Islamic world, in particular from Iran. A vicious cycle comes into play: Once Hamas, Iran or Al Qaeda institutions flourish, aid coming from other sources is reduced, further strengthening the value of the radicals' aid.
A second feedback mechanism involves radical Islam. As conditions of daily life become increasingly difficult, the Palestinians become easy prey. Islamic groups provide both material aid and spiritual comfort. The more rigid the doctrine, the more it eases the psychological difficulties of living in a violent, poor, and hopeless environment. The chaotic, desperate reality is explained and framed by a narrative that defines good and evil while promising justice.
Moreover, the Islamic movements have a broader agenda that bears upon their struggle with the West. Such groups have no real interest in a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as it may render their role redundant. They want to use the Palestinian situation as a springboard to wider activities.
Israeli policy, often driven by powerful minority groups, has contributed its share. There is a process of gradual absorption of Palestinian territories, with more than 160 Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Over the past decade, the number of settlers has increased from about 150,000 to more than 250,000.
Summing up, Palestinians grow up under occupation, experience violence as a childhood fact of life, face dismal living conditions, are aided by radical Islamists, and meet with hostile and aggressive Israeli incursions into their territory.
Looking ahead, the Palestinians believe there are processes working in their favor.
First, they see that Israel has ceded territory: in Sinai in the 1980s, in Lebanon in May 2000 and in Gaza in Ariel Sharon's August 2005 disengagement. Many interpret these pullouts as results, respectively, of the 1973 War, of the Hezbollah attacks in Lebanon and of the Hamas terror attacks from Gaza. Second, the July-August 2006 war in Lebanon exposed Israeli vulnerabilities. Third, Palestinians are well informed about the workings of Israeli society and spot weaknesses within Israel and the increasing fragmentation of its society.
Finally, if current demographic trends continue, there will soon be a clear majority of Arabs in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
In such a case the two-state solution may cease being feasible, since the presence of Arabs in Israel and Jewish settlers in the West Bank will make the drawing of clear demarcation lines impossible.
Peace is desirable because of the need to end the misery of so many terrorized, hurt and oppressed by this conflict. But strong fundamental forces are at play against this peace.
These negative forces have strengthened over the decades of conflict and are very likely to persist. For the foreseeable future, they may also triumph.
Eran Yashiv is an associate professor of economics at Tel Aviv University and a research fellow at the Center for Economic Performance of the London School of Economics.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/06/opinion/edyashiva.php
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Jimmy Carter
May 6, 2008
The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world by sea, air, or land. An entire population is being brutally punished.
This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.
Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who lived in the West Bank are now imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional ten who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.
Regardless of one’s choice in the partisan struggle between Fatah and Hamas within occupied Palestine, we must remember that economic sanctions and restrictions in delivering water, food, electricity, and fuel are causing extreme hardship among the innocent people in Gaza, about one million of whom are refugees.
Israeli bombs and missiles periodically strike the encapsulated area, causing high casualties among both militants and innocent women and children. Prior to the highly publicized killing of a woman and her four little children last week, this pattern was illustrated by a previous report from B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organization: 106 Palestinians were killed between February 27 and March 3. Fifty-four of them were civilians who didn't take part in the fighting, and 25 were under 18 years of age.
On a recent trip through the Middle East, I attempted to gain a better understanding of the crisis. One of my visits was to Sderot, a community of about 20,000 in southern Israel that is frequently struck by rudimentary rockets fired from nearby Gaza. I condemned these attacks as abominable and an act of terrorism, since most of the thirteen victims during the past seven years have been non-combatants.
Subsequently, I met with leaders of Hamas, both a delegation from Gaza and the top officials in Damascus, Syria. I made the same condemnation to them, and urged that they declare a unilateral ceasefire or orchestrate with Israel a mutual agreement to terminate all military action in and around Gaza for an extended period.
They responded that such previous action by them had not been reciprocated, and they reminded me that Hamas had previously insisted on a ceasefire throughout Palestine including both Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel had refused. Hamas then made a public proposal of a mutual ceasefire restricted to Gaza, which the Israelis considered and also rejected.
There are fervent arguments heard on both sides concerning blame for a lack of peace in the Holy Land. Israel has occupied and colonized the Palestinian West Bank, which is approximately one-fourth (28.5%) the size of the nation of Israel as recognized by the international community. Some Israeli religious factions claim a right to the land on both sides of the Jordan River, and others aver that their 205 settlements with some 500,000 people are necessary for "security."
All Arab nations have agreed to full recognition of Israel if it will comply with key United Nations resolutions. Hamas has agreed to accept any negotiated peace settlement between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, provided it is approved in a referendum among the Palestinian people.
This holds promise of progress, but despite the brief fanfare and positive statements at the peace conference last November in Annapolis, Maryland, a retrogression has occurred in the process. Nine thousand new Israeli settlement housing units have been announced in Palestine, the number of roadblocks within the West bank has increased, and the stranglehold on Gaza has been tightened.
It is one thing for other leaders to defer to the US on the crucial peace negotiations, but the world must not stand idle while innocent people are treated cruelly. It is time for strong voices in Europe, the US, Israel, and elsewhere to speak out and condemn this human rights tragedy among the Palestinian people.
Jimmy Carter, a former President of the United States, is founder of The Carter Center, promoting peace, health, and human rights worldwide. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m43798&hd=&size=1&l=e No Middle East Peace Without Tough Love
By Henry Siegman
25/04/08 "Al-Hayat" -- - We now have word that Tony Blair, envoy of the Middle East Quartet (the UN, the EU, Russia and the United States), and German Chancellor Angela Merkel intend to organize yet another peace conference, this time in Berlin in June. It is hard to believe that after the long string of failed peace initiatives, stretching back at least to the Madrid conference of 1991, statesmen and stateswomen are recycling these failures without seemingly having a clue as to why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is even more hopeless today than before these peace exercises first got underway.
The scandal of the international community's impotence in resolving one of history's longest bloodlettings is that it knows what the problem is but does not have the courage to speak the truth, much less deal with it. The next peace conference in Germany (or in Moscow, where the Russians want to hold it) will suffer from the same gutlessness that has marked all previous efforts. It will deal with everything except the problem primarily responsible for this conflict's multi-generational impasse.
That problem is that for all of the sins attributable to the Palestinians - and they are legion, including inept and corrupt leadership, failed institution-building and the murderous violence of the rejectionist groups-there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state primarily because Israel's various governments, from 1967 until today, have never intended allowing such a state to come into being.
It is one thing if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a Palestinian state until certain Israeli security concerns were dealt with. But no government that is serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued without let-up the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands that even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible.
Given the overwhelming disproportion of power between the occupier and the occupied, it is hardly surprising that Israeli governments and their military and security establishments found it difficult to resist the acquisition of Palestinian land. What is astounding is that the international community, pretending to believe Israel's claim that it is the victim and its occupied subjects the aggressors, has allowed this devastating dispossession to continue and the law of the jungle to prevail.
As long as Israel knows that by delaying the peace process it buys time to create facts on the ground that will prove irreversible, and that the international community will continue to indulge Israel's pretense that its desire for a two-state solution is being frustrated by the Palestinians, no new peace initiative can succeed, and the dispossession of the Palestinian people will indeed become irreversible.
There can be no greater delusion on the part of Western countries weighed down by guilt about the Holocaust than the belief that accommodating such an outcome would be an act of friendship to the Jewish people. The abandonment of the Palestinians now is surely not an atonement for the abandonment of European Jewry seventy years ago, nor will it serve the security of the State of Israel and its people.
John Vinocur of the New York Times recently suggested that the virtually unqualified declarations of support for Israel by Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are "at a minimum an attempt to seek Israeli moderation by means of public assurances with this tacit subtext: these days, the European Union is not, or is no longer, its reflexive antagonist." But the expectation that uncritical Western support of Israel would lead to greater Israeli moderation and greater willingness to take risks for peace is blatantly contradicted by the conflict's history.
Time and again, this history has shown that the less opposition Israel encounters from its friends in the West for its dispossession of the Palestinians, the more uncompromising its behavior. Indeed, Olmert's reaction to Sarkozy's and Merkel's expressions of eternal solidarity and friendship have had exactly that result: Olmert approved massive new construction in East Jerusalem- authorizing housing projects that were frozen for years by previous governments because of their destructive impact on the possibility of a peace agreement-as well as continued expansion of Israel's settlements. And Olmert's defense minister, Ehud Barak, declared shortly after Merkel's departure that he will remove only a token number of the more than 500 checkpoints and roadblocks that Israel has repeatedly promised, and just as repeatedly failed, to dismantle.
That announcement shattered whatever hope Palestinians may have had for recovery of their economy as a consequence of the seven billion dollars in new aid promised by the international donor community in Paris last December. In these circumstances, the donor countries, not to speak of the private sector, will not pour good money after bad, as they so often have in the past.
So what is required of statesmen is not more peace conferences or clever adjustments to previous peace formulations, but the moral and political courage to end their collaboration with the massive hoax the
peace process has been turned into. Of course, Palestinian violence must be condemned and stopped, particularly when it targets civilians. But is it not utterly disingenuous to pretend that Israel's occupation-maintained by IDF-manned checkpoints and barricades, helicopter gunships, jet fighter planes, targeted assassinations and military incursions, not to speak of the massive theft of Palestinian lands-is not itself an exercise in continuous and unrelenting violence against more than 3 million Palestinian civilians? If Israel were to renounce violence, could the occupation last even one day?
Israel's designs on the West Bank are not much different than the designs of the Arab forces that attacked the Jewish state in 1948 - the nullification of the international community's partition resolution of 1947. Short of addressing the problem by its right name-something that is of an entirely different order than hollow statements that "settlements do not advance peace"-and taking effective collective action to end a colonial enterprise that disgraces what began as a noble Jewish national liberation struggle, further peace conferences, no matter how well intentioned, make their participants accessories to one of the longest and cruelest deceptions in the annals of international diplomacy.
Henry Siegman, director of the US/Middle East Project in New York, is research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Siegman is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.
The near impossibility of a Mideast peace
By Eran Yashiv Published: May 6, 2008
E-Mail Article
Listen to Article
Printer-Friendly
3-Column Format
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TEL AVIV: With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visiting Israel this week and President George W. Bush expected next week, talks about peace between Israel and the Palestinians are on the agenda yet again.
This elusive peace is widely proclaimed as both essential and achievable. But while the former is true and desirable, the latter is a widespread misperception. The solution to the conflict exists and is well known, but it cannot be implemented in the foreseeable future.
Many policymakers and commentators believe a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli problem is possible for several reasons: First, rational people believe in rational solutions; second, the conflict is deemed "too important" not to have some resolution; third, the outlines of such a rational solution have been drawn time and again, so that the mere existence of a solution encourages belief in its implementation.
Over the past 12 years, four plans have offered a similar formula based on the establishment of two states. Indeed, the declaration issued at the end of the recent Annapolis conference builds on this logic.
So why should a rational solution have little hope of being achieved? Because there are serious disincentives to making peace that have to do with demographics, the intensity of violence and economics.
Today in Opinion
Medvedev's first crisisIt's about the White HouseBurma's twin disasters: A cyclone and the generals
Moreover, feedback mechanisms in operation reinforce the disincentives. Consider demographics: The median age of Palestinians is 17 years. Compared to a median age of about 37 years in the United States and 30 in Israel, the Palestinians are a very young nation.
A staggering 85 percent of the Palestinian population is under 40, and so was born under Israeli occupation, which began in June 1967. More than 40 percent of the Palestinians experienced the second intifada, or uprising, against Israel as infants or children. These facts mean that the majority of the population has experienced Israel only as an occupying force, within an increasingly violent environment.
More than 4,300 Palestinians have been killed in the past decade alone. The number of injured or traumatized Palestinians is in the tens of thousands. Given that it is very difficult to alter one's perception of the world formed in childhood, the probability that Palestinians will become more favorable toward Israelis is really nonexistent.
In an illuminating interview in The New York Times Magazine last year with a Hamas activist, Steven Erlanger quoted the man as saying, "I think this generation will be the liberation generation. If in the past, 1 percent of the people went into resistance, from this generation, 20 percent or more will do it. . . This generation will be our liberation army."
Potent feedback mechanisms reinforce these disincentives for peace. One has to do with the economic situation. Since 1999 the Palestinian economy has shrunk by about a third in per capita terms. The rate of unemployment has risen from 14 percent to 22 percent in the period 2000-2005, with recent numbers indicating high double-digit figures in Gaza.
The percentage of people below the poverty line has increased from 20 percent in the second half of the 1990s to over 40 percent, with approximately 15 percent classified as living in deep poverty.
This situation is a breeding ground for those who wish to buy influence through economic aid. One such group is Hamas, which built its political success on charity. Others include Iran and Al Qaeda.
Indeed, an adviser to the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, proclaimed in January 2007 that Hamas had received pledges of about a billion dollars from the Islamic world, in particular from Iran. A vicious cycle comes into play: Once Hamas, Iran or Al Qaeda institutions flourish, aid coming from other sources is reduced, further strengthening the value of the radicals' aid.
A second feedback mechanism involves radical Islam. As conditions of daily life become increasingly difficult, the Palestinians become easy prey. Islamic groups provide both material aid and spiritual comfort. The more rigid the doctrine, the more it eases the psychological difficulties of living in a violent, poor, and hopeless environment. The chaotic, desperate reality is explained and framed by a narrative that defines good and evil while promising justice.
Moreover, the Islamic movements have a broader agenda that bears upon their struggle with the West. Such groups have no real interest in a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as it may render their role redundant. They want to use the Palestinian situation as a springboard to wider activities.
Israeli policy, often driven by powerful minority groups, has contributed its share. There is a process of gradual absorption of Palestinian territories, with more than 160 Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Over the past decade, the number of settlers has increased from about 150,000 to more than 250,000.
Summing up, Palestinians grow up under occupation, experience violence as a childhood fact of life, face dismal living conditions, are aided by radical Islamists, and meet with hostile and aggressive Israeli incursions into their territory.
Looking ahead, the Palestinians believe there are processes working in their favor.
First, they see that Israel has ceded territory: in Sinai in the 1980s, in Lebanon in May 2000 and in Gaza in Ariel Sharon's August 2005 disengagement. Many interpret these pullouts as results, respectively, of the 1973 War, of the Hezbollah attacks in Lebanon and of the Hamas terror attacks from Gaza. Second, the July-August 2006 war in Lebanon exposed Israeli vulnerabilities. Third, Palestinians are well informed about the workings of Israeli society and spot weaknesses within Israel and the increasing fragmentation of its society.
Finally, if current demographic trends continue, there will soon be a clear majority of Arabs in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
In such a case the two-state solution may cease being feasible, since the presence of Arabs in Israel and Jewish settlers in the West Bank will make the drawing of clear demarcation lines impossible.
Peace is desirable because of the need to end the misery of so many terrorized, hurt and oppressed by this conflict. But strong fundamental forces are at play against this peace.
These negative forces have strengthened over the decades of conflict and are very likely to persist. For the foreseeable future, they may also triumph.
Eran Yashiv is an associate professor of economics at Tel Aviv University and a research fellow at the Center for Economic Performance of the London School of Economics.
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