FREE PALESTINE

Before you start reading this I want you to do one favour for me, see this video below



Words cannot express my feelings and knowledge about Palestine.

When I would remember how the British dominated India or the French and Portuguese dominated Africa, I thought for a long time that in current affairs such a domination of another country by somebody else will not be possible.Why, becaue the world would stand up for one of its brethren, there would be such a huge uproar that no country will be able to resist all the pressure, economic sanctions (the latest tool for getting a country to toe the line that you want). Imagine my deep surprise and anguish that even in today’s globalised world there are two countries which are being clinically subjugated and terminated, Tibet and Palestine. My heart goes to out to the people living in these countries. My country has been under the whims of British rule for years, I have read, heard and seen the stories of the oppressed during those years. We were slaves in a country where we were once the citizens.
I feel the time to share my pain and knowledge about Palestine with others and hope you would be my companions in this journey.

What were the first words that come to my mind when I think of Israel and Palestine. Israel – Mossad (probably because of my interest in reading books on espionage), Tel Aviv, great defence technology, victims of terrorist attacks.Palestine – bearded Muslim men, their heads covered, throwing stone, PLA, Yasser Arafat, exploding bombs in buses. So overall Israel- modern, victims, Palestine – conservative, terrorists. All this is probably a result of being exposed to only American books and movies eg Munich.

My position in this blog is that Palestinians have suffered a great deal, they are facing the greatest refugee crisis in the modern world and it is their side of the story that we know the least. I am going to try to give a summary of their story , if you want the details then please leave a comment and I would get back to you.

Till 1919 the original land of Palestine included both Israel and present Palestine (West Bank + Gaza strip). Although the ancient land of Palestine had its fair share of rulers (Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Jews, Romans), Palestine was home to Arabs who were 80% of the population were Arabs and a minority community of Jews. For example, the Jewish population in 1931 was 174, 606 against a total of 1,033,314."In the late 1930s Jews were being savagely persecuted in many parts of Europe. A religious sect of the Jews that is the Zionist sect said that Jews rightful home is in the land of original Palestine. Between 1882 – 1903 Jews from different countries swarmed to Palestine and started buying land there. What follows in the coming years is a horror story for me. The Jews with all their economic and military might started ousting Palestinians from their own homes. Palestine by large is an agriculture based economy which had been under the British rule till the end of World War 2 (meaning our fellow country when India was being ruled by British). The poor peasants had no chance to save their homes from being demolished by trained Israeli soldiers who had the support of the British weapons. So what happened next over the next twenty years was the beginning of the biggest refugee crisis still existing in the modern world, more than ONE MILLION REFUGEES. People had to flee their homes and go to neighbouring countries of Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. So close your eyes and imagine for a moment, people from one community coming from all parts of the world to your country and expelling you from there.

The people of Palestine are a persecuted lot, the people have been living under the tyrannical power of young Israel soldiers, the tremendous financial power of the Jewish state. The everyday life of a Palestinian is marked by the sights of Israeli checkpoints, soldiers and guns, tanks, bulldozers and the Wall. People have been displaced from their own homes which have been demolished by Israeli bulldozers.

Checkpoint
The Palestinian farmer faces mistreatment and humiliation at the hands of the Israeli soldier every day. And in one day he meets several such young men with the power of the gun in their hands in the several checkpoints that run through Palestinian areas. School going children, sick women wanting to go to the hospital, old people wanting to reach homes, all have to line up in queue to pass the checkpoint to their homes. And the checkpoint is between one Palestinian village and another. And don’t think the checkpoints are open throughout the day, oh no! it is open only during a specific period or in some cases whenever the soldier feels like it.

The Israeli soldier
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, the phrase come ironically alive in the case of a typical Israeli soldier at a checkpoint who is between 18-20 years and armed with all the modern weaponry in the world, sitting arrogantly inside a Hummer. Now you can only imagine what will happen when you give so much power to a person and tell him or her that his or her role is to maintain law and order over a community of people whom they are ruling over. I have seen videos of soldiers refusing injured women and in one sick incident even a hospital ambulance to pass the checkpoint for no reason at all. Armed with the words, ’ This is a secure military zone’, they have usurped the lands of many farmers even without possessing any official documents. The farmer like in our country is too poor to fight a long winded court case, that too in an Israeli court. And even if he or she does win the case, he or she would most likely come back to find suddenly Israeli settlements living on a part of the land, thereby it automatically becoming Jewish land and also under the protection of the Army. Thousands of acres of Palestinian land have been illegally occupied in this fashion so that the Palestinians are squeezed further into their already narrowing corner. This is a strategy that even the Chinese are employing in Tibet making me think whether there is a universal book on how to dominate other people’s countries.


The Wall
We have all heard about the Berlin Wall and seen pictures of people breaking down this divide between East and West Germany. Israel is building a wall 30 times in length and double the height of the Berlin Wall. Israel says that the wall is for protection from Palestinian terrorism, if so why does the wall cut into Palestinian land , snaking around them in such a manner that many communities are cut off from their natural resources like land and water. 52% of the Palestinian communities will be segregated into isolated military zones, enclaves. So one day I go outside my house to see a wall between my house and the pond where I drink water from, or from the well whose water I need to farm my lands, or even from my farming lands itself. If you want more information, please look up the website http://www.stopthewall.org/

In a letter Mahatma Gandhi said about the Palestine conflict – 1938 that, "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French…What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct…If they [the Jews] must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs…As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regard as an unacceptable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds."

The above are just are a few aspects of Palestinian life that I wanted to share with you all. I would encourage each one of you to go on an individual learning journey of this issue. The objective of the blog is not to justify some of the actions of the Palestinians which are on the path of violence but to bring about large scale awareness of the Israel Palestine issue and to push for a peaceful solution to the problem, the end of the terrible persecution policies of Israel, peace and justice for the million Palestinian refugees and the end to violence from both sides. Amen, Inshallah, Om. Before you leave, I would ask another favour from you, please check the below video, so as to leave this space with a visual memory