"The current decade has for Palestinians been particularly calamitous. Any remaining illusion that Israel would negotiate a historic compromise with the Palestinian people, or be compelled to relinquish the occupation by the Nobel peace laureates in Washington and Brussels, can no longer be sustained. Rather, the self-proclaimed leaders of the international community stood idly by while the government of Binyamin Netanyahu established one new settlement after another in the West Bank, and endlessly pontificated about Israel’s right of self-defence as it periodically launched murderous assaults against a Gaza Strip it helped to transform into the world’s largest prison camp.
As Palestinian refugee communities in the Arab world again faced existential crises, Israel’s leaders engaged in a systematic campaign of de-legitimisation and marginalisation against Arab citizens of Israel. This helps explain why the current unrest is not limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Yet it was in East Jerusalem and the West Bank that the fuse for the current events has been lit. Israel’s separation policy (“us here and them there”) has again proven itself incompatible with reality. The West Bank wall and blockade of the Gaza Strip have indeed insulated much of the Israeli electorate from the conflict. But constant violence and provocations by the Israeli military; the activities of Israel’s settler auxiliaries; and the Netanyahu government’s determination to change the status quo in Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif to shore up its belligerent credentials, have produced the inevitable once again."
