Is The Occupation Behind The Current Violence?

The Netanyahu government has conveniently and consistently separated the occupation of the West Bank from the repeated eruption of violence, insisting that the Palestinians’ unrest is a result of incitement by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, when in fact he has been attempting to reduce the tension. Not once has any Israeli official suggested that nearly 50 years of occupation might have brought the Palestinians to a boiling point. Any incident could have ignited a new violent flare-up, and the conflict over the Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif provided the spark that led to the current fire, regardless of whose side was at fault.

The most troubling issue is that successive Israeli governments remained blind and refused to connect much of the Palestinian violence to the occupation; what is worst is that the Israeli public has largely bought into the fallacy of this argument.

They are persuaded by the pervasive and misleading official narrative that even if Israel were to evacuate the West Bank, the Palestinians will not end their violent resistance to Israel’s very existence.

They insist that the Palestinians are determined to take over all of Mandatory Palestine rather than establishing a Palestinian state limited to the West Bank and Gaza, to live side-by-side Israel in peace.

More to read here...

http://www.alonben-meir.com/article/is-the-occupation-behind-the-current-violence/

Alon Ben-Meir’s dedication to writing about, analyzing, and offering practical solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict is the result of his many years of direct participation and personal experience in the Middle East. He is regularly involved in two-track diplomacy and continues to monitor closely events throughout the region.

Because Ben-Meir has over the years built close relationships with top government officials in the Middle East, and communicates with them regularly, he is able to analyze the situations that arise based on his access to first-hand sources. To gain even greater insight into the complexity of the region’s problems and interpret accurately and objectively underlying issues while staying on top of rapidly changing developments, he travels frequently between Washington and the Middle East, meeting with policymakers, academics, and people from all walks of life.

This article sums up much of what the problem is and that is echoed by Israeli Brigadier General Guy Goldstein, Deputy Director of Government Activities in the Territories and he is not alone.

You simply can't steal peoples land, bulldoze their homes, set fire to their fields, kidnap their children and torture and abuse them while you hold them, deny them their rights, stop them building, have settlers running round bristling with guns firing at them, stick checkpoints all over the place and humiliate them when they are going through them, dig up their olive trees, which in many cases are their only form of income, douse their homes and schools in skunk water, the smell of which makes you puke for days, people say it's the worst smell in the world, and designed to be so, enter homes in the middle of the night, trash them, terrorise the children and take them away, shoot them while they are trying to farm, make them use different roads and footpaths, allow the settlers to set fire to their homes and burn people to death, all of which is done with the IDF standing by and in some cases helping, attack the mosque over and over again and flout every agreement made with Jordan, who oversee it,  put people in jail and worse for organising non violent protest and if they hold a non violent protest attack them with stun grenades and tear gas, roll tanks into their towns and fill it with so much tear gas people can't breathe and die, then hold your hands up and say 'oh dear, we don't know why they are kicking off, we don't know why they are attacking us, look at us, we are so much the victim'  Yea right!

Whilst at the same time telling them they will never be granted an independent sovereigh state of their own and they will have to live under occupation forever because it all belongs to Israel - the bible told them so.

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You're signature says it all.

It certainly does, and funnily enough, so do all the members of the current Israeli Government.