Palestinians Unsure Which Israeli Leader Will Keep Gaza and the West Bank United

The biggest national concern of Palestinians today is to make sure that the Israeli attempts to split Gaza from the West Bank doesn't become permanent. Egypt and the Palestinian Authority have been made to look bad in the eyes of the Arab world because of their refusal to fall for the trap to make Egyptians responsible for Gaza and possibly Jordan to take care of the West Bank thus destroying the possibility of an independent Palestinian states with contiguity.

For years now the Israeli government has been carefully and methodically trying to permanently cut of the future Palestinian state's two geographical parts. Attempts by the former US secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to regulate the movement of people and good between Gaza and the West Bank failed to materialize.

The Israelis used the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, to make near permanent the ban of movement between Gaza and the West Bank leaving Gazans in economic and humanitarian catastrophe.

While the head of the Israeli Labor Party, Ehud Barak has stated that he favors a tunnel connecting the West Bank and Gaza, the issue has not received much traction among the two leading candidates for Prime Minister, Kadima's Livni and the Likud's Netanyahu.

The two state-solution has gathered international consensus repeated this week during the first speech of the US Vice President Joe Biden. Few people have paid attention to the word "territorial contiguity." All international public statement about the two state solution (including those made by former president Bush) spoke of a viable independent Palestinian state with contiguity alongside Israel.

Palestinians hope the new Israeli government would also deal with these many issues that affect their lives as all wait for a political breakthrough on the larger issues.
For Palestinians many other issues remain to be resolved by the upcoming elections. Permanent status negotiations have been held up because of disagreements on Jerusalem and the fair solution of the Palestinian refugee problem. Settlements and their expansion continue to be a sour point in all talks. Hundreds of checkpoints and Israel's continued refusal to return to the pre-October 2000 positions are also part of the problem between both sides.

While the results of the coming Israeli elections are important, the most important new element in the formula is the new administration in Washington. The decisive victory of the anti-Iraq war and pro-talks with Iran nominee will no doubt have a major influence on the US-Israel relations vis-a-vis the peace process. The appointment of the anti-settlements Senator George Mitchell and his decision to open an office in Jerusalem speaks volumes as to what the new Israeli government should expect from the Obama administration.

The Arab world is also in a state of flux after an emotional 22 days of constant bombardment of Gaza and the powerful pictures of the carnage on television. Millions of Arabs took to the streets and an entire region was angry by the inability of anyone to stop the daily carnage in Gaza that a huge schism has been created. Regimes such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority were in a state of retraction from their moderate and accommodating positions.

At times one gets the feeling that Israelis are oblivious to many of these issues as they try to compete amongst themselves who is tougher in dealing with Palestinians. One would hope that once the results are tallied that the real problems between Israelis and Palestinians will be given time by the newly elected officials.

Comments

[thruthseeker]

The land of Israel is a Jewish symbol and our link with it defines our identity.

Relinquishing it would be comparable to national suicide..

[thruthseeker]

Israel is the national home, the spiritual dwelling, and the foundation for the liberty of the Jewish people.

[nochaos]

As the Arab leaders cannot keep Gaza and the West bank together...why should any Israeli leader bother to try??? Hamas and Fatah hate each other...to Israel's benefit!! Why should Israel get them together??? What a geo-political faux pax THAT would be !!

[BubbaC33]

According to international law any land taken during a defensive war can be held, even annexed, by the controlling entity. IN other words, the West Bank is legally and morally a part of Israel. The fact is Israel took the West Bank not from "palestinians", but from Jordan. Stated simply, it was Jordanian territory and now it is Israeli.
The West Bank must stay as a part of Israel for a number of reasons. One is it provides Israel with the strategic depth necessary for the defense of the Jewish State. By holding onto the West Bank Israel can make certain there is no future prohibitioin keeping us from our holiest sites, which was the law from 1948 to 1967. A third consideration is the need for an early warning for missles fired at israel by a number of our hostile neighbors. And then there is the question of Jerusalem. It is the capital of Israel and no negotiation will ever change that fact.
The Wset Bank and Gaxa are not connected and do not belong together.

[S1m0n]

Defensive war? It's hard to claim self-defense when every single battlefield of the war was outside Israel.

Israel has two national myths of this war:
1. They attacked us!
2. We won brilliantly won by attacking first and by surprise.
The fact that myth one and myth two are mutually exclusive never seems to matter.

[BubbaC33]

Irseal did not fire the first shots of war. That took place when the Egyptian military illegally closed the Straits of Tiran.
When the Arab armies massed on the Israeli borders it was an act of war. Anything we did after that was justified.
In 1973 I spent my 19th birthday on the Golan fighting alongside friends and comrades to stop the onslaught of Syrian armor and infantry in order to prevent the destruction of Israel. Spin all of it however you want, but the land is ours.

[moflard]

"The occupying State shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct."
HAGUE CONVENTIONS 1907

"Protected persons who are in occupied territory shall not be deprived, in any case or in any manner whatsoever, of the benefits of the present Convention by any change introduced, as the result of the occupation of a territory, into the institutions or government of the said territory, nor by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power, nor by any annexation by the latter of the whole or part of the occupied territory. "

"The Occupying Power may not alter the status of public officials or judges in the occupied territories, or in any way apply sanctions to or take any measures of coercion or discrimination against them, should they abstain from fulfilling their functions for reasons of conscience."
GENEVA CONVENTIONS 1949

Israel has appropriated private property, destroyed infrastructure, and has deliberately installed systems of discrimination. All against International Law.

[BubbaC33]

Great quotes, but your conclusions are inaccurate.

[Hasur]

Jabotinsky wrote in 1925:
"Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop under the protection of a force independent of the local population --an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in to, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy."
Your claim that Palestinians left their villages (all 400,000 of them) at the request of Arab armies/government is total nonsense. The were no 5 arab armies. The only army that could have resisted the Zionist was the Arab Legion of Jordan, and the did so to keep the west Bank and east Jerusalem (as part of what they already negotiated with the Zionist) they did very little else. The ALA (Arab Liberation Army) was a rag tag group of volunteers with outdated, malfunctioning equipment. Israel was able to continue it’s operations to depopulate and/or destroy arab villages and towns (which had begun prior to May 1948) while at the same time repel any opposition from the “invaders”. This would NOT have been logistically possible if Israel was in a fight for its existence.

[nochaos]

And they lost it in 1967 when Israel was strong enough to send out the illegal occupants: JORDAN!!

[Hasur]

Israel is a zionist colonial state. It has never fought a war to defend, but that which it has colonized or expropriated. The underlying force in all your posts is colonialsm. While other apologists try to, unsuccessfully, reconcile Israel's callous behaviour within the confines of the rights of the palestinians, yours is the classic denial of the rights of indigenous palestinians to their homeland. Your forefathers had no illusions about the collonial nature of zionism. To many zionists, palestine was not an "occupied" land in the sense that those indegnous people who had been living there since teh Roman period were "strangers" and had to be expelled.
In his diary Herzl wrote in 1895:
"We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country."
Jabotinsky wrote in 1923:
"They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true favor the Aztecs looked upon Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. Palestine will remain for the Palestinians not a borderland, but their birthplace, the center and basis of their own national existence."

[BubbaC33]

Spin it however you want, but prior to the First Aliya land was purchased in large numbers and from absentee owners. Add to that the fact that a number of visitors to the region described it as desolate and mostly unoccupied.
Since 1948 Israel has turned the desert into a garden, something the Arabs had been unable to do.
The land is ours, we have protected ourselves and our land in a number of defensive wars.