The root cause of what is occurring in Palestine today is not political chicanery, as a number of Western commentators have asserted, but the prolonged perpetuation by lsrael of what can only be called a colonialist culture. This has finally created a fatal disconnect between ordinary Palestinians and leaders on both sides of the border. Ordinary Palestinians are saying that they have endured enough denigration and are taking matters into their own hands. The Palestine Authority President, Yasser Arafat, is no longer effectively leading the Palestinian masses. He is following them, desperately trying to regain enough credibility and control to restore his authority ...
The repeated cycles of political confrontation followed by negotiations ... have consistently failed to resolve any of the underlying issues that have for so long fuelled Palestinian rage and despair. Genuine political autonomy, free of Israeli military and political hegemony, despite all the promises and assurances, has not been achieved. The de facto annexation of Arab land has continued unabated. Since the 1970s, there has been a 73 per cent growth in the number of Jewish settlements. Jerusalem remains unresolved. The plight of the vast refugee populations, who live in squalor and virtual economic serfdom along Israel's borders, and who have credible claims for compensation for properties lost in the turmoil that followed the establishment of the Israeli state, have never been meaningfully addressed.
... Colonialist structures are inherently reactionary, uninclined to relinquish their grip on their subalterns unless they are coerced into realizing that the costs of perpetuating subjugation exceed the' rewards of abandoning it ... It is hard for both Israelis and bewildered outsiders to understand why still another dose of vague promises of eventual statehood are not enough of an incentive to keep rock-throwing Palestinian school children off the streets and Arafat at the bargaining table. As in all past colonialisms, to repeat, a point is reached where its victims just refuse to be rational anymore. When that point is reached, sweet reason falls by the wayside. That is what has happened in Palestine today ...
The June War of 1967 was the turning point. Victory transformed Israel from a state under siege to a conquest state. Israel for the first time acquired control of populations that were outside the purview of her natural socio-political boundaries. Controlling conquered territories in the name of security became the country's supreme preoccupation. Out of this preoccupation, unfortunately, there developed the disdain and contempt for a conquered and occupied people that has been the progenitor of colonialist structures everywhere. The colonialist culture brings out the bully in one! Israel's reluctance to evolve policies leading to an eventual termination of its imperium culminated in the first intifada and now to the even worse conflagration we are witnessing in Palestine ...
... In 1995, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres saw that reconciliation was imperative ... They understood that the colonialist structure had to end. The mainstream of both Israeli and Palestinian society were ready for reconciliation. But the effort ended in a fusillade of assassination and suicide bombings. Fundamentalists and extremists on both sides destroyed the dream. (After).the elections of 1996 ... the new Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, employed obfuscation and endless knit-picking as a means of indefinitely prolonging Israeli dominance by stringing out interminably negotiations that were supposed to lead to Palestinian statehood. The silent majority on both sides were sold out by these tactics not only because they once more postponed the inevitable but because they re-energised the fundamentalists and extremists lurking on the fringes of both societies ...
The coming of Barak appeared to offer one more opportunity for the Rabin-Peres model to reassert itself ... Camp David seemed to offer hope ... simply because time has run out ... The Palestinian masses have gone over Arafat's and Barak's heads and declared that the only acceptable solution is immediate Palestinian statehood. Nothing less than this will successfully dissolve this crisis because nothing less will terminate the colonialist structure that is fuelling it ... We are witnessing the end of the Israeli Raj just as in 1947 the world witnessed the end of the British Raj. (Source: The Hindu, 21.October, 2000)
