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Palestinian in sentence

1687 examples of Palestinian in a sentence

Israel’s Election in a BubbleTEL AVIV – Forty-five years into Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, and four years after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government became the undertaker of the two-state solution, an electoral campaign run in utter denial of Israel’s Palestinian conundrum has just ended with yet another Netanyahu government in office.
With opinion polls indicating that only 18% of the electorate was concerned with the Palestinian problem, Labor, the party of Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords, refrained from even mentioning the peace process, lest it alienate potential voters.
Labor’s current leader, Shelly Yachimovich, superseded the fatalism of her predecessor, Ehud Barak, who maintained that the Palestinian conflict has no solution, with the politics of denial; she refused even to acknowledge that there is a problem.
Meanwhile, Jewish Home, a party linked to fanatical, messianic rabbis for whom Zionism should now be imbued with eschatological meaning, challenged Netanyahu to adopt a more resolute expansionist policy in Palestinian territories.
To make his point, Lapid even launched his electoral campaign in Ariel, an Israeli city built in the heartland of the Palestinian West bank.
The bottom line, however, is that even the domestic issues that loomed so large in the election can never be addressed effectively without regard for the colossal sums that Netanyahu and his allies have been pouring into the occupation system in Palestinian lands.
What is certain is that the vacuum left by Sharon’s departure from politics is all the more striking in view of the images of chaos emerging from the Gaza that Israel has vacated, and the collapse of the Palestinian authority before our eyes.
But even in countries where there is some degree of political pluralism and an absence of civil strife or domestic armed conflict – such as Lebanon and Tunisia, and potentially the Palestinian Authority and Algeria – incremental approaches can achieve only partial success.
With Israel, the terms are ostensibly simpler: in exchange for a stronger US security guarantee, Israel would accept the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.
The Palestine FolliesAmerican foreign policy in the Middle East experienced yet another major setback this month, when Hamas, whose Palestinian government the United States had tried to isolate, routed the rival Fatah movement in Gaza.
For 40 years, since the Six-Day War of 1967, there has been one realistic possibility for peace: Israel’s return to its pre-1967 borders, combined with viable economic conditions for a Palestinian state, including access to trade routes, water supplies, and other essential needs.
Even when the US or Israel have tabled peace offers, such as at Camp David in 2000, they have included convoluted ways to sustain the West Bank settlements and large settler populations, while denying an economically viable and contiguous Palestinian state.
The most recent debacle began when President George W. Bush called for Palestinian democracy in 2004, but then refused to honor the democratic process.
Hamas, a radical movement, won the Palestinian election in January 2006, but not before blatant pre-election meddling by the US in favor of Fatah, which merely helped to boost Hamas’s legitimacy.
Palestinian politics, always self-destructive, has reached new heights of internal conflict, pulling the population deeper into disorder and pushing them further away from statehood.
Rejecting a deal with Israel in 2000, Fatah instead launched a violent revolt that has lasted ever since then, destroying the infrastructure built up in the Palestinian territories during the previous decade.
When Yassir Arafat, the perennial PLO, Fatah, and Palestinian Authority leader, died, Palestinians in theory had a chance to end this history of disasters.
One of Fatah’s few remaining assets is that the West, horrified by Hamas’s more open hate-mongering and extremism, has largely boycotted the new Palestinian regime and cut off aid.
In Palestinian politics, total victory and Israel’s destruction is still preferable to an honest assessment that this goal is unattainable, terrorism must be abandoned, and law and order must be imposed.
How the Palestinians respond depends largely on how the Palestinian body politic deals with the growing power of Palestinian Islamic movements, which undoubtedly expect a significant share of power in post-withdrawal Gaza.
Will armed groups resume their fight against Israel, or will the Palestinian Authority act to defuse or combat the attacks?
Abbas also wants weapons in only one set of hands – those of the Palestinian Authority.
He successfully persuaded Palestinian militants to hold their fire and show Israelis and the world that dismantling settlements need not involve Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Failure to do so will lead to yet another defeat for the legitimate Palestinian aim of attaining a viable state.
Whereas Hamas has demanded establishment of a Palestinian administration to supervise the areas vacated by Israel, Abbas has rejected this, agreeing at most to a “monitoring committee” in which representatives of Hamas will participate.
In addition, after the reoccupation of the West Bank’s cities in April 2002, Israel arrested about 7000 Palestinians who are allegedly associated with Hamas, Fatah, and other Palestinian groups.
This would, of course, cement its central role in Palestinian politics – and it would just as surely exacerbate the challenge facing Abbas.
Can Hamas, with its newly acquired position at the forefront of Palestinian politics, provide such a solution?
And the unity government that it established with the Palestinian Authority in June brought no relief.
Despite its modest military capabilities, Hamas managed to hold out for 51 days – and, in the process, place itself at the center of Palestinian and regional politics.
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