Twenty-four votes in favor, nine against, and fourteen abstentions. The resolution – on the initiative of Pakistan – on violations in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel was approved at the United Nations Human Rights Council. A resolution that Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu rejected denouncing “the open anti-Israeli obsession of the UN”.
The ceasefire seems to last, but will the peace last? War, every war, begins when one does not intend to recognize, and one arrives at denying, the other and his reasons. The war between Israelis and Palestinians has been going on for 73 years, alternating phases of only apparent calm and hot clashes, for this very reason. And it is terrible because even those who look and judge the facts from afar often get infected by the logic of war, which is always unreasonable and ruthless.
Real violence is injustice, Gandhi said. The real violence in Palestine is called the 54-year occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel, against UN resolutions 242 and 181; it is called apartheid which exists in Palestine, as the reports of the UN, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, of B’Tselem, have long denounced. It is called expropriation of Palestinian lands with illegal colonies that are growing every day.It is called the Wall of Shame, checkpoints, daily imprisonment of Palestinians including children, uprooting of olive trees, demolition of houses, denial of Palestinian rights: to freedom, to land, to independence, to dignity.
These are the names of violence that are silenced when it comes to violence in Palestine; violence always attributed to the Palestinians, who from being attacked become aggressors. Any criticism of Israel is branded with “anti-Semitism”; we forget to mention that the Palestinians are also Semites and are the object of anti-Semitism by the majority of Israeli Jews.
There will be peace in Palestine when the occupation ends, the mother of all violence. But Israel does not want peace, it wants all of Palestine, from the Mediterranean to Jordan. And Israel is taking it out, by force, violence, with the silent ascent of the US, the Arab countries, the European Union, and the media!
