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From: ST
Date: 11 May 1999
Time: 09:27:32
Remote Name: 24.112.43.62
Remote User:
ON May 4, 199. the Palestinian people had hoped that their leaders would be able to stand up to Israel and the US and declare their independence after decades of Israeli occupation. They could have insisted that their freedom required a unilateral act asserting self-determination for the Palestinian people. May 4, 1999 should have been a day for saying to the world in their own "loud and clear voice" that they would not wait for authorization from Israel to live as full human beings, as a people, holding inalienable rights, determined to live free in their own state. Instead, once again it was disregarded. Palestinians have no free passage from Gaza to the West Bank, they are consistently denied the travel permits that would allow them to pray at the holy places of Jerusalem. They are hounded and harassed unmercifully for the "crime" of being Palestinian. Their land is stolen and their homes demolished. Their people in Jerusalem are stripped of their right to live there, their young people are tortured in Israeli prisons, their rights under the Fourth Geneva Convention are wantonly disregarded as the Israeli goverment proceeds with settlements and collective punishment. They are deemed as sub-humans by their"partners in peace" that they are not allowed to use the same roads. On the verge of the third millennium, millions of Palestinians are scattered to the four corners of the earth. Many live in refugee camps and still have the key to their home and the title to their land. Many can tell the painful story of how their father/grandfather died of old age and broken heart in Beirut, or Amman with the key to their home in their pocket, never having seen again the home they fled in 1948. Meanwhile a Jew fleeing the horror of the Holocaust lives in this Palestinian man's home, not troubling to ask for the name and whereabouts of it's rightful owner. There is a moral ambiguity here, but it does not justify one opressed people doing wrong to another. The nonstop process of parley and obfuscation of the Israeli interlocutors is beginning to look like a good deal more than delay. It is justice denied, perhaps irrevocably and forever. The Palestinian are worthy of far better.
ST A Lebanese Citizen, seeking justice for all.