Interview with Polish Portal ONET two days ago about Gaza

How great is now the risk of war on a large scale between Israel and the Palestinian Authority? The current conflict is exacerbated with each day. Is there a risk of serious military escalation? 

The question assumes two parties with equivalent force. In order to understand the situation, one must understand the root cause. The seeds of the conflict were planted when European Jews at the turn of the 19thC decided that they needed a country of their own and set their sights on Palestine. The problem was that Palestine already had a people, the Palestinians. With the rise of Hitler, more and more Jews started to come to Palestine. In 1900, Jews were about 5% of the population. By 1947, when the UN partitioned Palestine, Jews were still the minority and they owned only 7% of the land. What the Jews had was might. During the British mandate, the Jewish militia was armed and trained and at the same time the British destroyed the Palestinian leadership and largely disarmed the Palestinians.

The Jews, decided that they needed more land, and so they devised a plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine. They began to execute their plan at the end of 1947. Although the Jews were able to drive out the majority of Palestinians, they didn’t succeed in removing them all. As a result, the majority of Palestinians were made refugees. Israel razed over 500 Palestinian villages and took the nice Palestinian homes and gave them to Jews. Israel refuses to allow the Palestinian refugees to return.

In 1967, Israel occupied the rest of Palestine and has been colonizing it against international law ever since. The Palestinians in the West Bank have lived under a brutal Israeli military rule since 1967. The Palestinians in Gaza are currently living in an open air prison, a ghetto. Israel colonized the majority of Palestine and is in the process of colonizing more of the West Bank. What we have is a situation of oppressor/oppressed, colonizer/colonized, occupier/occupied. This situation is more analogous to Apartheid South Africa.

My ancestors came from Bialystok in the late 1800s. I was always told that I was Polish. Before I went to Poland, my father was looking for photos of his ancestors and found his grandfather’s obituary. It stated that he was born in Bialystok, Russia. Surely the Polish people understand what occupation means. That is the situation for the Palestinians.

http://stopmakingsensedotorg.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/palestine-loss-of-land.jpg

There is no war per se, it is one side which has an overwhelming power trying to maintain its occupation and a seven year siege on Gaza.

Israel is a nuclear regional superpower with weapons of mass destruction. It has one of the strongest militaries in the world. The Palestinians have no army, no navy, no airplanes, no tanks. In Gaza the majority of people are women and children living on less than $2 a day. Israel receives over $3 billion dollars a year from the US.

The Palestinians are fighting with homemade rockets and determination.

The Palestinian Authority is an interim government designed to serve the occupying power. The risk is to pull the carpet out from under the Palestinian authority which has been managing the Israeli occupation for the last 20 years. When this Authority disappears, the risk will be a new intifada.

Could other Middle Eastern states or terrorist groups join current conflict between Israel and Palestinian Authority? Is there such a risk?

Middle Eastern states are helpless and have shown nothing but lip service to the Palestinians. I think it’s helpful to look at the Middle Eastern countries and Eastern Europe the same way. If Poland is attacked, would the rest of Eastern Europe rise to its defense?

When I was in Poland, I visited the Warsaw Uprising Museum. I learned that Russia said it would help Poland against Germany, but it just sat back and waited for Germany and Poland to fight it out and weaken each other and then it went in and took part of Poland. The Middle Eastern countries are in the same region, but each country has its own interests.

The Palestinians are alone in this which is evident by Egypt closing its border with Gaza.

Through the Reagan years, the US considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist and the ANC a terrorist organization and the Apartheid government our ally. Today we regard Nelson Mandela as a freedom fighter.

A number of Israeli Prime Ministers – Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir to name a couple were considered terrorist by the British because they engaged in terror to drive the British out. They called themselves freedom fighters.

Could some diplomatic initiative prevent the escalation of this conflict? 

Of course it could. The US gives Israel over $3 billion a year as well as complete diplomatic and military support.

An Apartheid minister said to a US minister that he knew that the rest of the world was against the Apartheid government, but as long as they had the US, they didn’t need anyone else. Once the US turned its back on the Apartheid government, it fell.

The US has the leverage, but the Zionist lobby is so strong that it doesn’t have the ability. In the US, we are bombarded with Zionist propaganda. We lack complete knowledge of the conflict. First there needs to be awareness of the root cause because with awareness comes understanding and understanding leads to change.

In America we have Jews who want a Jewish state in case there’s ever a need. It’s their bomb shelter. We also have Christian Zionists who believe that for the second coming of Christ, all the Jews need to return to the land of Israel and then they will be given a choice of to convert or die. These two groups are well organized and funded. The majority of Americans don’t care what’s happening on the other side of the world.

Middle East attracts the world’s attention again because of events in Iraq and the establishment of the Islamic State by ISIS. Perhaps this fact would force such initiative and led Israel and Palestinian Authority to conclude a truce?

I doubt it.
ISIS and company did not exist until the US waged a war on behalf of Israel to remove Saddam Hussein.

There is no war between the Palestinian Authority and Israel to have a truce. In addition to internal political positioning within the Israeli coalition government, Israel started the war to divert attention from its responsibility for the failure of peace talks and to undermine the new Palestinian unity government.

What about the leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority? Are these leaders the ones who are able to work out such an agreement in Your opinion? 

The Israeli foreign minister announced just days before Israel’s war on Gaza that he was leaving the election coalition with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Other members of the Israeli coalition announced their rejection of any peace agreement with the Palestinians. Israel backed down and did not release the last batch of Palestinian prisoners as it agreed to do in what was negotiated by John Kerry. Israel continued to build Jewish only colonies on the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem on the same land supposedly slated for the future Palestinian state.

There is currently no Israeli government that is capable of reaching peace with the Palestinians. Israeli travel maps of the country show that Israel considers its boarder to be from the Mediterranean sea to Jordan river with separate areas called Palestinian territories On the other hand, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been more than accommodating to the US and Israel. They have offered to give up claim to the all of Palestine and have agreed to a Palestinian state on only 22 percent of historical home. Israel isn’t interested. If it was, it wouldn’t continue to colonize the West Bank.

Israel accepted the proposal from Egypt to end the ongoing conflict, but Hamas rejected it. Why did this happen? After all it was an opportunity to end this conflict.

There was no proposal to end the conflict. Hamas said no one contacted it officially with a written ceasefire proposal. The Palestinians have supported a ceasefire that would result in releasing all the prisoners who were arrested in the West Bank and to lift the military and economic blockade on Gaza.

Both sides of this conflict stress that they only defend themselves, but at the same time they are accusing each other of the ongoing attacks. Is it a question of propaganda and desire to show his strength? 

The question you are asking is: Is Israel, the oppressor/occupier/colonizer defending itself from the people it is oppressing/occupying/colonizing? Was the Apartheid government defending itself against the blacks in South Africa? 

It is not a defensive war. Israel has waged a nonstop war on Gaza by a military blockade since 2007. This war started when Israel accused Hamas of kidnapping three illegal Israeli settlers in an area under complete Israeli military occupation.

On June 30th, following a government emergency security meeting, Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon spelled out a plan to ”… eradicate Hamas. We will not stop until Hamas is completely destroyed.”

On July 10 and after more than 400 raids throughout Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Israeli Knesset “While the campaign has gone as planned further stages yet await us.”

At an earlier meeting, he assured members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that “cease-fire right now … is not even on the agenda.”

Israel continues to colonize Palestinian land. The Palestinians are living under a brutal Israeli occupation. The situation is not equitable or balanced. Where there is oppression, there will be resistance.

Why the civilians, once again, are drawn into the conflict? Hamas does not attack Israeli soldiers, Hamas deliberately is shooting at civilian targets in Israel. In turn, Palestinian civilians fall victim of Israeli air raids.
Gaza is one of the most populated places on the planet. It is an open air prison, a ghetto. The freedom fighters are imprisoned in a ghetto with the civilians.

Facts speak for themselves.

Israel has killed nearly 200 people in the last week, most of them women and children, and this is not defensive (Israel had been occupying Palestinian territory for three decades before a single rocket was fired into Israel, and Israeli forces killed four Palestinian children and dozens of adults this year before the three Israelis were abducted).
• 193 Palestinians have been killed since July 7 (80% civilians).
• 36 children have died as a result of Israeli attacks.
• Among those killed: 18 people from a single family (including 6 children and 3 women, one of whom was pregnant) and 9 people watching the World Cup at a cafe.
• 1,361 Palestinians have been injured. Of those, 386 are children and 249 are women.
• 73 schools have been hit by Israeli strikes.
• 1,255 homes have been destroyed or severely damaged, and tens of thousands of people have been displaced.
• 22,800 children have been traumatized by the bombing and need psychological support.
600,000 people are at risk of losing their water supply. )
From If Americans Knew.

Only one Israeli soldier was killed.

Palestinian civilians are not victims by accident as most of Israel’s more than 1400 raids have targeted civilian areas and directed at specific homes.

Who should step down in this conflict in order to conclude the truce? Who, or what, is an obstacle on the road to peace? How to end this drama? . 

Israel and the US are the obstacles to peace. Israel is the occupier and the US its enabler. Currently there are more Palestinians living under Israel than Jews. Israel can either agree to a two state solution or a one state solution. To end this conflict, we must have a just solution based on the truth. Israel must end the occupation.

This new conflict was initiated by Israel to supposedly avenge the killing of the three illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank, not even in Gaza.

The almost harmless and aimless homemade rockets fired from Gaza were the only available means to fight back against Israeli atrocities. Enjoying the freedom of movement and peace are inalienable basic rights for all people. I
To end the drama, build hope and peace for both people not just one side.

Why Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ongoing since 1948, isn’t resolved until today? There were several major conflict and many peace initiatives, also with the participation of world powers. May the reason be the fact that it is also a cultural and religious conflict, or some kind of mental conflict? 

This is a conflict over land. The majority of Israelis want Palestinian land without the Palestinians.

Israel has not finished colonizing and ethnically cleansing all of Palestine. Israel uses the conflict as an excuse to steal more land and blame the Palestinians.

Zionism is an ethnic, nationalist, colonist effort.
Israel was established on the ruins of more than 500 Palestinian villages and the displacement of the majority of Palestinians.

This conflict will continue for as long as Israeli continues to deny its responsibilities for the displacement of the Palestinians and its occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and their siege on Gaza.

What does this long conflict look like from the point of view of the ordinary people of Israel and Palestine? Aren’t the civilians the ones who pay the highest price for this conflict? 

As is the case in wars, civilians pay the highest price. In this case, the Palestinian civilians have paid a disproportionately high price.

Here are some statistics:  http://www.ifamericansknew.org/

Many Palestinians still live in dire conditions in refugee camps. Don’t You have an impression that Palestinian civilians are used by political leaders for political purposes? 

These refugees did not come from the moon. As I stated earlier the first step in reconciliation is for Israel to accept its responsibility towards these refugees.

Germany, not Nazi Germany, accepted its responsibility toward what happened to Jews under another system of government, the Nazis. Germany did not even say, it was not us but the Nazis who persecuted Jews, they just took responsibility and compensated the Jews for their losses. Maybe that would never make up for the suffering of Jews, but it was a first step.

In this case, it is the same Zionist system that displaced the Palestinians in 1948 and continues to occupy them now. Israel should own up to its own responsibilities just like the Germans did.

Isn’t the fate of the refugees used also by the Arab countries leaders who want to achieve their own goals? It seems that the Palestinian civilans are the biggest victims of Middle East politics.

Palestinian civilians are primarily the victims of Israeli oppression. They wouldn’t be refugees if Israel did not displace them. Israel was accepted at the United Nation with the understanding that it agrees to UN resolution 194 which called for the return of all refugees to their homes. Israel refuses to comply with the UN resolution.

Each Arab country has its own interests and agenda just like each Eastern European country does.

Do You believe that within the next few years peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority could be concluded? On what basis such peace agreement should be based? 

I sadly don’t see it. Israel prefers the status quo, no peace no war since that allows it to continue stealing Palestinian land making it even more difficult than ever to establish a Palestinian state.

It can do that with complete impunity from the US.

Would the peace breakthrough between Israel and the Palestinian Authority mean the peace for the entire Middle East? Could it contribute to the end of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict? 

Achieving peace for the Palestinians would be first step.