The notion that Israel is victimizing the Palestinians is one of the cardinal—perhaps the cardinal—paradigms of international politics since the 1967 Six-Day War. Not only the left, both in Israel and abroad, subscribes to it, but also a large part of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and just about all of official Europe. It goes without saying that the paradigm is regnant in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
It is hard, then, to get anyone interested in Palestinians victimizing Palestinians—suggesting that the seeming preoccupation with Israeli-ruled territories has something to do with the great value many people find in the Jew-as-victimizer prototype. Similarly, once the United States—supposedly the oppressor—had left Southeast Asia in the early 1970s, it was hard to get any but a few of the opponents of that presence interested in the ensuing horrendous victimization of Vietnamese and Cambodians by other Vietnamese and Cambodians.
Last week, though, an Israeli outfit called the Jerusalem Institute of Justice (JIJ) tried to buck the trend. It presented to the European Parliament a report on “The Status of Human Rights on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” The reports notes that “a surprising silence prevails regarding the violation of human rights by the Palestinian government authorities in the Territories,” and that, even though these are by now widely documented, “the EU continues to push for full and immediate statehood for the [Palestinian Authority].”
And while the JIJ focuses mainly on Europe, it could, naturally, also have said similar things regarding the Obama administration’s preoccupation with getting statehood for the Palestinians—fast; which seems to have waned only recently in an election year.
In a short section called “Arbitrary Imprisonment,” the JIJ relates that in 2011 the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) received
- complaints of more than 1,400 arbitrary arrests in the West Bank and more than 300 in Gaza.
Although most of the cases were and are connected to the conflict between Fatah and Hamas, there were also many cases of political arrests of reporters, teachers, university professors, students, Mosque Imams and other persons who opposed the reigning government.
I think one thing that would prove your point yidvocate is the kurds does any one care that there are kurdish people thoughout the arab world who are treated like dirt yet no one cares to give them a home land. The kurds also have a more legitimate claim then the palestinins about a home land being that the kurds actuly are a people with a unique culture.
This anomaly is immediately resolved once one realizes that this has nothing to do with the Arabs and everything to do with the Jews. Does any serious person think for one minute that the world would have heard of the “Palestinian People” had their conflict been with anyone other than the Jews? The world couldn’t give a fig for the “Palestinian People”. When one realizes that this have everything to do with Jew hatred, it all falls into place. It then all makes perfect sense.