Palestine

Two million people are living in an area of 365 square km, with only 5 percent portable, piped water and eight hours of electricity a day. This is merely the tip of the iceberg of just how bad living conditions are in Gaza today.

Around half of the population live below the poverty line (53 percent), youth unemployment is almost 70 percent and around three-fifths of households are severely or moderately food insecure (62 percent). The United Nations warned in 2012 that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020 unless basic services and conditions are improved.

“We, the Palestinians, are losing our shadow!” These are the words of 32-year-old Sanaa abo Gazal when I asked her to describe what life is like today in Gaza, the world’s largest prison. The people there simply cannot get out from under the 13-year siege imposed by Israel and Egypt. “They are waiting for their soul to come out of their body,” Sanaa says. “Two million are under siege. Two million are in curfew. No food. No electricity all day. No water every week. Some of us are waiting for the mercy of the Gulf states, dreaming of having the $100 from Qatar.”

In 1964, Denis Goldberg and other ANC comrades were on trial for their lives at what became known as the Rivonia trial. Against expectations the judge did not impose death but gave them several concurrent life sentences instead. The young man shouted out jubilantly to his mother, “It’s life! Life is wonderful!”

Denis was born of Jewish immigrant parents, both communists. After involvement in local racially unsegregated civil rights movements in the 1950s, he joined the communist party.

In Gaza, we understand what being under a blockade is like. More than two million people have lived under siege for over ten years, it is one of the most crowded places in the world and has experienced three wars that have destroyed infrastructure including hospitals and health centres.

With much fanfare and mutual backslapping, Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu launched the US government’s “peace plan” at a glitzy press conference on 28 January. In addition to the world’s media, three Gulf states sent their ambassadors: the UAE, Bahrain and Oman (although the Omani ambassador confided to the Times of Israel that he didn’t even know what was in the document).

With much fanfare and mutual backslapping, Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu launched the US government’s “peace plan” at a glitzy press conference on 28 January. In addition to the world’s media, three Gulf states sent their ambassadors: the UAE, Bahrain and Oman (although the Omani ambassador confided to the Times of Israel that he didn’t even know what was in the document).

Nur Masalha’s Palestinian history is a powerful antidote to Zionist narratives, and to accepted Western narratives, which place Palestine as a territory that began its life in 1918 under British rule.

Masalha details Palestine’s 4,000 year history, from Late Bronze Age Egypt through the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic empires to the modern era.

The streets of Tel Aviv were adorned with rainbow flags alongside Israeli ones on 8 June as thousands of Israelis took to the streets for their 20th annual pride march.

To those unaware of the ethnic cleansing and genocide carried out by Israel on a daily basis for the past 70 years, the self-proclaimed “gay capital of the Middle East” would have appeared to represent a very tolerant and open society.

Can you explain why the protests had the focus around the border?

Firstly stop calling it a border, there is no border. This is all part of the land of Palestine. If you want you can call it an Israeli-imposed barrier because that’s what it is. The protest called itself a great march of return.

The idea was that 70 years of displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people must come to an end and they be able to go home, and since about 80 percent of Gaza’s people are descendants of 1948 refugees the idea of return is very relevant to them.

Bernard Regan has produced a timely and well researched analysis of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. The declaration stated unequivocally the British government’s support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The qualification that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” was a view observed less in its implementation than in its negation.