Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

FOR ISRAEL’S 60th anniversary celebrations next year, a national bird will be chosen for Israel to call its own. According to Israeli officials, “This is part of the culture of nature-loving nations and a tool to generate local identification. It is also a way to raise the issue of environmentalism and animal protection.”

The director of the Jerusalem Bird Observatory has suggested that the Israeli public be a partner in choosing a bird to represent and be identified with the country. The bulbul, a festive songbird that is common in Wadi El Bazan, Wadi Al Qilt and Ein Qeenia, and the Palestine sunbird, a small black bird with glittering iridescent colors prevalent in desert areas, were considered, but its English name kept the latter out of the running, according to Haaretz.

While this discussion on birds was taking place among Israelis there was an internal revolution provoked by some Palestinians on another bird: the one in the title of Speak Bird, Speak Again, an anthology of Palestinian folk tales. The book was ordered pulled from school libraries by an official in the Palestinian Ministry of Education, reportedly over sexual innuendo and “shameful expressions” to which, according to the ministry decree, students should not be exposed.

Although Minister of Education Naser-Al Deen Al Shaer clarified that the book can remain in the hands of teachers but not of schoolchildren, the controversy resulted in several protests and demonstrations on Palestinian streets and was used as an opportunity to describe the government as “the radical Hamas militant government,” “people of darkness” and “the Taliban of Palestine.”

Of course these calls were trumpeted by the mainstream Western media. Although this press reports few if any of Israel’s daily atrocities against all Palestinians, it suddenly is greatly concerned about “Palestinian intellectuals angered, oppressed and worried that Hamas [is using] last year’s election victory to remake the Palestinian territories according to its hard-line interpretation of Islam.”

The Western media fail to mention, however, that Speak Bird, Speak Again is not the first book banned in Palestine. The late Edward Said’s books were banned throughout Palestine by the same Palestinians who are making such a big fuss today, and their house “intellectuals” remained silent. Nor is it only in Palestine that the Ministry of Education censors what is allowed in the hands and minds of its pupils—similar controversies arise in France and the United States.

In the midst of this foul propaganda, neither the international media, the “Palestinian intellectuals” nor the government on the defensive paid any attention at all to the poor bulbul and the Palestinian sunbird that are being hijacked by Israel for its own use.

Among other things, Palestine is experiencing a crisis between a Western-supported class of elite Palestinians that has its own associations and institutions and is self-identified as the cultural face of Palestine, and ordinary Palestinians, many government employees, who are growing increasingly weary as they struggle to earn a living. Their voice is heard neither locally nor internationally. Although many do not realize it, the distance between the two classes is increasing, and the resulting fragmentation in Palestinian society continues to spread like a plague among our people.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics’ study of the demographic and socioeconomic status of the Palestinian people at the end of 2006, the Palestinian elite class grew wealthier, despite the embargo and the widespread poverty it has caused. Income distribution in 2006 was reshaped in favor of rich households at the expense of the middle class. In fact, the share of income earned by the richest 10 percent of Palestinian households increased by 24 percent during 2006 (from 25.1 percent in 2005 to 30.6 percent at the end of the second quarter of 2006). On the other hand, middle class income declined by 12 percent, while the share of income earned by poorest 20 percent of households did not change.

Washington’s Favored Few

Just as Washington, through its punitive embargo, taketh away with one hand, however, it also giveth with the other to those in its favor. The U.S. State Department has set aside a huge budget to “protect and promote moderation and democratic alternatives to Hamas,” and provides money to NGOs and other groups with ties to Palestinian political parties “not branded as terrorist groups.” The money is used to train politicians and secular parties opposed to Hamas—“to create democratic alternatives to authoritarian or radical Islamist political options”—and also is given to journalists who snipe at the government and manipulate public opinion.

According to reports, private Palestinian schools will receive $5 million in order to offer an alternative to the government-funded public education system—meaning the brainwashing will start from childhood.

Western money is helping create political and civil society elites, domesticated Palestinians who bend their language to their masters’ requirements. Acting contrary to our values and our reality, they alienate us—yet are allowed to speak in our names. As long as they are willing to sell out and divert the Palestinian national agenda, the international community is willing to give them every right, and the right to everything.

Yet they espouse the same dogma of the people they look down upon—the same fractional, tribal, and regional mentality—and run the same one-man show, with a central person in the position of power regardless of others’ education or level of professionalism. They have a monopoly on the job market and the power to hire and fire. Those they hire come from the same political and ideological background.

They see their mission as being to civilize the jungle dwellers called Palestinians and to teach us about ideals that sell very well abroad: peace and democracy education (in theory only), gender issues and women’s rights (as if all other Palestinians enjoy their human rights), and dialogue and partnership (a de rigeur subject these days).

Western donors are most unlikely to fund a Jerusalem-based Palestinian NGO, or one working for Palestinian prisoners’ and refugees’ rights.

When I attend workshops and conferences on mental health in Palestine, I hear about incest—which is extremely rare in Palestine, and when it does happens it is the result of a psychologically pathological situation—more often than I hear about the problem of mental retardation, which is so tragically prevalent and for which we have no decent institutions. But demonizing our men and condemning Palestinian patriarchy is a good cause for those seeking funds and the donors who want to reinforce our stereotypes. Yes, there is patriarchy in Palestine—a patriarchy that protects women and provides a resolution for disputes in the total absence of a state. If my car has a flat tire, 10 men I don’t know will come to help fix it. In Paris, on the other hand, a woman was raped in the Metro and no one intervened. Let’s be fair to our community and focus on the norm rather than the exception, and learn how to prioritise instead of always competing for foreign funds. Between Western donors and their favored recipient organizations, many local birds find no nests in Palestine.

Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist practicing in her native Jerusalem.

MORE THAN HALF the Palestinians population—53 percent—are children under the age of 17. The majority of Palestinians, therefore, consist of the community’s most vulnerable members. Not only are they in a crucial stage of physical and mental development, but they are a direct target of Israeli military violence. As the fourth generation of Palestinian trauma, moreover, they are the bearers of the accumulated heavy inheritance of national loss. No wonder, then, that the current four-year-old crisis is raising grave concerns about the present and future of the children of Palestine.

With the exception of recent media reporting of the latest Israeli atrocities in Gaza, which killed 35 children, more than a third of the total number of victims, the plight of Palestinian children is unknown to people following our crises on television. Media reports typically slander our children’s reputation, character, culture and even religious principles, or treat them as mere statistics. The reality of our young ones’ lives is invisible in international news coverage.

Instead, the media portray Palestinian children as unloved by their families, who push them into harm’s way to achieve political gain or use them for economic reasons. Palestinian fertility is treated as an epidemic; our culture is stereotyped as one of violence and hatred. Even though it is not we who are the world’s producers of horror movies and war games, as the conflict seeps into every aspect of our children’s lives, as our kids become more accustomed to the noise of bombardment than to the singing of birds, as violence permeates our homes, schools and public places, it is no wonder that our kids invent their play from such reality. The soldiers versus the intifada boys is the game played in almost all Palestinian homes.

Attesting to Israel’s deliberate targeting of children is the fact that 20 percent of the total number of intifada victims were children going about their normal daily activities such as going to school, playing, shopping, or simply being in their homes or yards. They were killed and injured in Israeli air and ground attacks, by indiscriminate fire from Israeli soldiers, or by being shot by IDF snipers. Indeed, among those children injured, 45 percent were wounded in the upper parts of their bodies—in their heads, necks or chests—while other were shot from behind, or in their eyes and knees to permanently handicap them without increasing the number of those killed.

Recent international studies have concluded that 40 percent of the children living in the West Bank and Gaza are anaemic, while 23 percent suffer from chronic or acute malnutrition. This predisposes them to contract life-threatening diseases, affects their intelligence and vastly increases the rate of attention deficit disorder. Women who were malnourished in their youth have increased rates of premature birth and high blood pressure in pregnancy.

Israel’s wall and siege have affected our children’s’ schooling. A significant drop-out rate has been correlated with oppressive Israeli measures. Not only have Palestinian students been killed, injured, and arrested, but Israeli occupation troops have shelled and attacked hundreds of schools, closed several, turning them into military bases, and hindered teaching at many others. Children and teachers on the way to school are routinely tear-gassed, harassed, or present when soldiers open fire. All of this, needless to say, affects the quality of instruction and a child’s ability to perform well once in class. Additional factors such as increasingly stressful home environments and Israeli military raids on residential neighborhoods exacerbate the difficult situation.

Our children also suffer from an increasing poverty rate. A staggering 66.5 percent of Palestinians live below the poverty line. Unemployment has risen to more than 65 percent of the labor force. Consequently, large numbers of children are forced to play an adult role and work to help their families survive. An estimated 2.3 percent of Palestinian children between the ages of 10 and 17 years old are working. One hears poignant stories of children dropping out of school due to difficult economic circumstances that force them to sneak through mountains and valleys to reach Jerusalem, where they can sell cigarettes and water bottles at the road junctions for little gain.

Our children are also among those who suffer in Israeli prisons. Israel currently holds 370 children, including some as young as 11 years old, in its detention centers and prisons, and a further 209 turned 18 while imprisoned. Testimonies gathered from child prisoners, and confirmed by local and international human rights organizations, indicate that from the moment of arrest and throughout their incarceration these children are subjected to a systematic pattern of physical and psychological abuse, often amounting to torture. Such abuse includes being beaten, tied in contorted positions for extended periods of time, deprived of food and sleep, and being threatened and humiliated. Family and attorney visits regularly are obstructed or denied.

Israel’s subjection of Palestinian children to killing, torture and dislocation is flagrant and touches every aspect of their lives. Its blatant violation of the 1989 Child Rights Convention and the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention has raised the concerns of local researchers, academics, and governmental and non-governmental institutions, especially in the area of mental health.

Some studies suggest that psychological trauma has affected more than 68 percent of Palestinian children, arresting their normal psychological, mental and social development. As a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry, I have made the following notes based on my limited observations and impressions while working in Palestine.

Many children were brought to pediatric and psychiatric clinics suffering from symptoms attributable to their direct involvement or witnessing of political violence. They exhibited symptoms of depression, such as feeling sad, lonely and desperate, and physical signs such as loss of appetite. Others showed signs of anxiety, such as feeling sick and worried, or having pains all over their body thinking of bad and frightening things. Some complained of sleeping difficulties, such as having nightmares and bad dreams, fear of the dark, or waking up frequently during the night. Cognitive problems were manifested in poor school performance, reading, and writing, or in having difficulty concentrating and remembering. Symptoms of aggression included difficulty controlling hostility, destructive behavior, and quarrelling and fighting with adults and peers.

Despite the trying circumstances of their lives, however, Palestinian children also exhibit resilience. Examples include students’ participation in cleaning up the rubble from the demolition of a friend’s home, visiting an injured colleague, taking an active role in peaceful demonstrations, and alternative education, when they continue to go to school against all the obstacles.

One survey showed that while 85 percent of children surveyed believe that the political situation is unlikely to improve, 90 percent responded that personal and academic ‘’self-improvement’’ was their main way of coping with the current situation and preparing for the future.

Even though our children’s suffering will continue as long as Israel occupies our land, it is essential that in the meantime we provide to the best of our ability the conditions necessary for their healthy development, such as stability, security, recreation, and sound nutrition. What is needed instead is public awareness and organized efforts to protect them from the dangers that surround them.

This can be done on two levels: first by lessening their isolation—by developing “adoption” and friendship programs with people in the outside world, for example, including Palestinians in the Diaspora and understanding people in the international community. This will not only help our children morally and intellectually, but will let them know there are people living outside Israel’s walls who think about them and communicate their love to them. This will also help our children to communicate better themselves, through arts, languages and modern technology.

Palestinian children living under occupation also should be urged to take action. During the first infifada, those who participated in active resistance against Israeli soldiers were found to have fewer symptoms than those who did not, and had better coping abilities than those who felt helpless and stayed at home.

At the societal level, Palestinians need a sense of collectiveness, especially following the death of their leaders. Palestinians already have a remarkably strong social fabric and family solidarity. Despite all the poverty, our people don’t search for their food in trash cans, and no one sleeps in the street, despite the hundreds of homes demolished. Since it also was found during the first intifada that children who had warm and supportive experiences with their parents had fewer symptoms, an effective welfare system would have a positive effect on the whole society.

Commitment to an ideology and an understanding of why events occur can be an important contributor to steadfastness, enabling people of principle and ideology to better cope with difficult times.

It is hard not to wonder whether Israel’s targeting of Palestinian children is deliberately designed to create a traumatized future generation, passive, confused and incapable of resistance. It is no secret, after all, that psychological trauma is not a temporary crisis but a phenomenon with long-term effects that will become more prominent as the physical injury subsides. Clearly, it will take many years to mitigate the damage inflicted on our next generation. Still, and even more than ever, our children represent our hopes.

The overwhelming and ceaseless atrocities of Israel’s government leave most Palestinians with little opportunity to reflect on the moral aspect of our resistance. Most often our reactions to events are immediate, instinctive and emotional. The few who still manage to consider the moral, political and strategic aspects of our struggle may find themselves all but stymied by the contradictions, the lack of choice, and the damage done by war to both reason and conscience.

How can Palestinian resistance be fairly assessed, then, with due consideration given to the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The occupation of Palestine is based on a 19th century ideology that denied the very existence of the Palestinian people and pursued a colonial agenda asserting divine claims to a “land without a people.” In response to this “theo-colonial” aggression, the Palestinian resistance adopted the strategy of “a protracted people’s war” to regain recognition as a dispossessed, rather than “nonexistent” nation.

To this day Palestinians still have no state or armed forces. Our occupiers subject us to curfews, expulsions, home demolitions, legalized torture, and a highly imaginative assortment of human rights violations. No justifiable comparison can be drawn between the level of official accountability to which Palestinans are held for the actions of a few individuals and the responsibility for the systematic and intense violence against the entire Palestinian population practiced with impunity by the state of Israel. The American media call our search for freedom “terrorism,” thus casting the Palestinian in the role of the international prototype for the terrorist. This has shaped Western public consciousness and resulted in an international bias that tends to describe instances of violence against Palestinian civilians in neutral language, reducing Palestinian losses to mere faceless statistics, while using emotional language and visuals to describe Israeli losses.

This distortion of the Palestinian resistance has clouded all reasonable dialogue. Many of our efforts to defy the arbitrary rules of the occupier are reflexively dismissed as “terrorism,” and we are always expected to apologize for and condemn Palestinian resistance—despite the lack of agreement on a definition of terrorism, and the fact that the right to self-determination by armed struggle is permissible under the United Nations Charter’s Article 51, concerning self-defense.

Why is the word “terrorism” so readily applied to individuals or groups who use homemade bombs, but not to states using nuclear and other internationally prohibited weapons to ensure submission to the oppressor? Israel, the United States and Britain should top the list of terrorism-exporting states for their use of armed attacks against non-combatants in Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and other parts of the world. But “terrorism” is a political term used by the colonizer to discredit those who resist—as the Afrikaaners and Nazis named the Black and French freedom fighters, respectively.

There also is a trend among those who oppose Palestinian resistance to use the term “jihad” as a synonym for terrorism. In doing so, they reduce the meaning of jihad to mere death. Jihad is a rich concept which includes struggling against one’s lesser self, the effort to do good deeds, actively opposing injustice, and being patient in times of hardship. It is not about violence against God’s creatures, or not fearing death in defending the rights of God’s creations. Violence can, however, be a rational human’s means of defense. When a woman reacts violently when threatened with rape, that is a form of jihad.

Moreover, jihad is an Islamic value—and not all Palestinian fighters are Muslims. The reason why young, sincere altruistic Palestinians blow themselves up is a secret they take with them to the grave. Perhaps it is the strange fruit of revenge growing in the fertile soil of oppression and occupation, or their profound protest against merciless cruelty; or a desperate attempt at attaining equality with Israelis in death, since it is impossible for them in life. Those who live under inhuman conditions all their lives are, unfortunately, capable of inhuman acts. What is left for the homeless thousands in Rafah except their resistance? It is not Islam; it is human nature, shared by religious, secular and agnostic Palestinian men and women. Certainly our women bombers do not die in the expectation of 70 virgins awaiting them in Paradise.

Another factor influencing Palestinian resistance is the gloomy history of peace talks and the lack of international support. Negotiations with Israel have given us nothing but promises of autonomy over our impoverishment, while enforcing the will of the powerful and establishing illegalities, as the basis for a lasting settlement. The most glaring absence in this peace process was an honest peace broker. The United Nations has been unable to take steps to ensure the implementation of Palestinian rights. The world has offered not a single remedy for the numerous wounds the Palestinians have suffered; Washington repeatedly has used its veto in the Security Council to thwart the broad consensus calling for an international monitoring presence in the West Bank and Gaza. The relentless denial of Palestinian rights without an effective verbal or actual international response has left us acutely aware that self-defense is our only hope.

International law grants a people fighting an illegal occupation the right to use “all necessary means at their disposal” to end their occupation, and the occupied “are entitled to seek and receive support” (I quote here from several United Nations resolutions). Armed resistance was used in the American Revolution, the Afghan resistance against Russia (which the U.S. supported), the French resistance against the Nazis, and even in the Nazi concentration camps, or, more famously, in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Palestinian resistance arises out of a similarly oppressive situation. The degree of violent response varies from case to case—indeed, in many instances resistance is mainly nonviolent. Despite all the odds against them, people resiliently continue to live, study, pray and plant crops in occupied land. In a few cases, they actively resist and resort to violence. This violent resistance may be defensive (and, thus, to my mind, morally acceptable), such as the resistance of the Jenin refugee camp fighters as Israeli death machines approached; or it may take the form of unacceptable offensive acts, such as the bombing of Israeli civilians celebrating a Passover meal.

In all cases, however, it is individual Palestinians who choose the form of resistance, and the choices they make should not characterize the entire nation. Also, as we have seen, both peaceful and violent resistance are met with sanctioned, deliberate state violence by the democratic and free Israeli government and its forces. The death of American peace activist Rachel Corrie is evidence enough of that.

“Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” some people wonder. Our Gandhis are either in prison, in exile or in graves. Nor do we have a population in the hundreds of millions. We are 3.3 million unarmed, defenseless individuals facing 6 million Israelis, virtually all of them soldiers or reservists. This is not industrial colonization; the Israelis are practicing ethnic cleansing to secure the land for Jews alone.

It is ironic that few of those who exhort Palestinians to emulate Gandhi question Zionism, the root cause of the Israeli occupation. In 1938, however, Gandhi himself questioned the premise of political Zionism. “My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice,” he said. “The cry for the national home for the Jews does not much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?”

Gandhi clearly rejected the idea of a Jewish state in the Promised Land by pointing out that the “Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract.”

Violent resistance arises from an inhuman military occupation, one that levies punishment arbitrarily and without trial, denies the possibility of livelihood and systematically destroys the prospects of a future. The Palestinian people have not gone to another people’s homeland to kill or dispossess. Our ambition is not to blow ourselves up in order to terrify others. We are asking for what all other people rightfully have—a decent life in the land of our birth.

What is most troubling about the criticism of our resistance is that it cares little for our suffering, our dispossession, and the violation of our most basic rights. When we are murdered, these critics are unmoved. Our peaceful, everyday struggle to live a decent life makes no impression on them. When some of us succumb to retaliation and revenge, the outrage and condemnation is directed at us all. Israeli security is deemed more important than our right to a basic livelihood; Israeli children are seen as more human than ours; Israeli pain more unacceptable than ours. When we rebel against the inhuman conditions imposed upon us, our critics dismiss us as terrorists, enemies of human life and civilization.

But it is not to appease our critics that we must revisit our resistance. It is because we care about Palestinian morality and morale.

International law and the historical precedent of many nations sanction the right of a people suffering from colonial oppression to take up arms in their freedom struggle. Why should it be different in the case of Palestinians? Is not the point of international law that it is universal? Americans claim life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as their most fundamental human rights. It is fitting that the right to life should be mentioned first. After all, without the right to remain alive, to be safe from attack, to defend oneself against attack, the other rights become meaningless. Fundamental to that right is exercising the right of self-defense.

We Palestinians continue to face a brutal occupation with exposed chests and empty hands. I believe in dialogue in the Israeli-Palestinian encounter, but negotiations should never be the only option; they must go hand-in-hand with resistance to the occupation. While the Israelis talk to us they continue to build settlements and hastily construct a wall that will further constrict and violate our rights. Why should we abandon our right to resist and remain living in the realm of the murderously absurd?

To live under oppression and submit to injustice is incompatible with psychological health. Resistance not only is a right and a duty, but is a remedy for the oppressed. Even if not as a strategic, pragmatic option, we should resist as an expression of—and insistence on—our human dignity. Violent resistance must always be in defense, and as the last resort. It is important, however, to distinguish between permissible (military) and impermissible (civilian) targets, and to set limits for the use of arms. Nor must the oppressor be exempt from these same principles.

The history of our resistance must be explored and assessed from the perspectives of law, morality, experience and politics, taking timing and context into account and with due regard for human rights, international law and widely shared norms of behavior. Palestinians must be creative in providing effective peaceful alternatives for resistance that can invite the progressives of the world to join our struggle.

Ultimately, the strength of the Palestinian plight lies in its moral, humanitarian characteristics; it is to our benefit to find moral, humanitarian means to protect that strength.

WHEN I meet the mother of a Palestinian killed in this conflict, I don't cry with her or ask her to show artificial pride and strength. Instead I say, "Your beloved is in God's hands, where life is more just and fair than ours." Many times, my words have been effective. But when I meet a mother of a Palestinian political prisoner, I don't know what to say. I choke with the words dead in my throat.

A month ago, I went to Neve Tirza to stand in solidarity with a group of women political prisoners inside the jail who were on a hunger strike. There were only about 50 of us in the protest, a meager group compared to the massive crowds that usually follow the funeral of a martyr or the hundreds who line up outside universities to holler out their positions and announce a strike in protest.

Standing there looking at the meager showing, I imagined that some who might have joined us had been stopped at checkpoints. Certainly others had to make use of a day in which Israeli travel restrictions had relented to see what food they could find. Perhaps some hurried to their offices in hopes of getting a little work done before the mid-afternoon rush hour, then racing to get home before a new closure took affect.

But despite my efforts to make the best of things, the sight of the small group made me think of the sad words of Mahmoud Abu Al Sukkar, a Palestinian man who spent 26 years of his life in jail because he dared express dissent when Zionists came to take his land.

"I used to think that if you call Palestinians to stand in solidarity with their prisoners, the streets would be full of the thousands. But that was my fantasy and imagination," he lamented in his loneliness.

Abu Al Sukkar's expression of isolation nudges me to remember how our Palestinian negotiators have neglected and disregarded the thousands of freedom fighters who spent and are still spending the best years of their lives behind bars. What if the greatest among us are in these prisons, waiting and holding out for their chance to lead?

I lament the lack of care we appear to express for these prisoners. Except for the prisoners' own families who have longings and fears for their loved ones' safety, few among us recreate the greatness of our prisoners outside the walls that encircle them. Think, for example, how Nelson Mandela made prison his platform, supported by his community outside.

Israel is notorious for its political prisons - Neve Tirza, Abu Kbeir, Dimona, and others. While the government of Israel keeps captives as young as 14 in these jails, few Israeli human rights organizations speak out consistently against the inhuman conditions and physical and psychological torture endured by the captives.

That no one in the Palestinian Authority moves to improve conditions in these prisons is proof of the current void between the Palestinian power structures and morally concerned people within and without Israel's iron walls. Palestinian and Israeli peace activists alike lament the situation.

"Where," wrote one concerned Israeli, "where in the world do you put 14-year-old girls in prison for being politically active? Only in Israel!"

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela spent 28 years in prison. He was tough, refusing to capitulate to his captors' demands, rejecting opportunities for freedom and waiting instead for the moment that he would gain freedom not only for himself, but for all his people. He had the strength of character to be a man of the people and the people were ready to engage the leadership he offered. Mandela never forgot his people and, they, in turn, did not forget him.

Standing outside Neve Tirza, I know the names of some of the prisoners. But there are so many. Whom have we forgotten?

When our prisoners leave their cells, will we Palestinians be ready to embrace the sacrifices they made and open to them the avenues of leadership? Given that we are all virtually prisoners in our own homes, are we even able to see potential for leadership among ourselves? Could it be dormant,lying in front of our very eyes, unrecognized, but ready just the same?

Since the beginning of Intifada II more than one year ago, Israeli (and now Palestinian) prisons have swelled, occupied by those who would not follow the rules. Given that half of the Palestinian population is under the age of l5, it isn't surprising that many of the prisoners are in their prime: youthful, willful, wanting more from life. What do we say to the parents and grandparents of our young prisoners, especially when some of these have been captured by their own police and put away, out of sight and out of mind?

We bend, abashed, like the animals in George Orwell's "Animal Farm." In Orwell's satire, the leaders of the animals are pigs. It is a sad day when the lowly citizen-animals open the doors of their leaders' inner sanctums and discover that those they trusted are eating ham. Saddened, the animals take the ham and give it a decent burial.

Will we gain freedom at last only to cringe in resentment for those who used our youth not to win our freedom, but to feed themselves? Or will we bow in reverence to those great and small who sacrificed themselves for our well-being?

If any place on the globe has witnessed conflict as wearing as that in Palestine, it is Africa and yet, look at the men who have risen from the depths of African despair: Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu and others who have lead an effective relevant life despite all the traumatic experiences they had.

For us, the young people of Palestine, the future is ours. Either we will succumb to self-pity or we can bury our dead, hold our heads high, turn away from our prison walls and lead.

While I felt that our protest in front of Neve Tirza was disappointingly small, I'm glad I stood with 50 people on that day. It was my way of remembering, and of sharing in initiative.

Mother Teresa wrote, "Don't wait for leaders, do it alone, person to person." So, I and the 49 others who made our presence known gave credence and visibility to the women inside the Israeli government had hoped would slip into oblivion (along with the rest of us).

We may not have a Nelson Mandela among us, but perhaps we have better. We have thousands of political prisoners willing to sacrifice freedom and happiness for Palestinian independence.

Whether hidden inside Israeli or Palestinian prisons or locked away through house arrest or community bantustans, none of us are giving in. We stand broken but not bowed, troubled but not humiliated, by Israel's expression of might.

Mandela stands out as one leader whom prison could not quell. The other great rule-breaker of our time, Mahatma Gandhi, died in 1948, the same year Zionists occupied the first part of Palestine. But those were different times for those seeking independence.

Now, governments of the "civilized" world manufacture conflicts that reverberate like the movie "Star Wars." Here in dusty Palestine, we're not thinking of Star Wars. We've seen the missiles come and go with flares and sprays of light. We've felt billy clubs on our heads, endured the kick of soldiers' heavy boots and resisted the bullets of contempt. We need to stand tall, not dissolve in flames of hateful conflagration.

If we fail to honor our living as well as our dead, I worry that our national liberation will not be what we expect. I am troubled that we may succumb to the humiliation of our own silence and remain captives, unable to take control of our own destinies.

I honor our prisoners of war; I pray that they will not be forgotten at the negotiation table and I await the day when we, the young people of Palestine, can show the world what leadership means.

Samah Jabr is a Physician and a life long resident of Jerusalem.

Source: Palestine Report (JMCC)