A week ago, on October 25, six Palestinians were killed and twenty others injured in an Israeli army raid in the occupied West Bank, mainly in the city of Nablus.
Event “unimportant”, which followed several others of the same order, in Nablus, Jenin and elsewhere since the beginning of the year, and almost ignored by the foreign press.
The rest of the world has forgotten the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ultimately, he may be interested in the elections in Israel, where the fifth early ballot in less than four years will take place tomorrow… A vote which, to try a metaphor, could well give birth to the “Return of the Mummy”, as in Italy in recent days: Silvio Berlusconi in Rome, Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
The “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is no longer really one, since one of the two camps has completely crushed the other since the beginning of the 21st century.e century, after the failure of the so-called Oslo process.
The confrontation can today be described, by one of the two camps (the Palestinian), as a minimal and desperate resistance to a victorious and almost total occupation. And by the other camp (the Israeli), like a succession of anti-terrorist military-police operations, to crush the last gnats which still disturb public order.
The latest episodes feature, in particular, two groups named “Lion Pit” and “Brigades of Jenin” which, according to the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyamhave recently carried out a series of attacks against Israeli soldiers and settlers.
Their fighters are young and vomit “the Palestinian Authority”, do not go to mosques and act on a decentralized basis. which represents, according to Al Ayyam, “a rupture” compared to the intifadas of the 1990s and 2000s. “Rupture” rhymes here with “despair”.
The “Oslo years” were an extraordinary episode, with high dramatic intensity, forgotten, but which was at the heart of international news in the 1990s – when the Palestinian question was still important.
The process was to give birth to a Palestinian state, small but real, living in peace and soon in reconciliation with its Israeli neighbor.
This process had, at the time, aroused torrents of naive hope. It appears retrospectively, before History, as the last chance for a bilateral Israeli-Palestinian agreement. The totally marginal character of the “Palestinians” subject in the current campaign in Jerusalem is an unmistakable sign: for the Israelis, the question is settled.
This “settlement” of the question, if it is experienced as a “case closed” by the Israelis, can take other names. Organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch no longer hesitate to use the term “apartheid” to designate the fate reserved for the 6.8 million Palestinians (including Israeli Arabs) who face the 6.8 million Israeli Jews. , in the space between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
According to Human Rights Watch, for example (April 2021), “Israeli authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians because of their identity to varying degrees. […] In some areas, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution”.
The frequency of elections in Israel contrasts with the continuity and consensus around its policy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem: division of the Palestinian territory into numerous small enclaves (Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, etc.), each surrounded and isolated from others by as many colonies as possible inhabited solely by Jewish settlers.
These Palestinian islets are hemmed in, tied up, surrounded by these Jewish “settlements”, pretty and verdant, more and more extensive and connected to Israel by a maze of modern roads. So many barriers for a Palestinian population locked in its dust and its concrete blocks, between the Wall, the olive groves and the orange groves now prohibited or destroyed.
Under these conditions, continuing to speak, as some diplomats still mechanically do, of the “right of the Palestinians to a future independent state” is a denial of reality and an insult.
François Brousseau is an international business analyst at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]