Arabs48
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com
Tuesday, 15 July 2014

The fatal Palestinian trinity
By Haneen Zoabi
Palestinian member of Knesset

There are no concrete military outcomes for what is happening in Gaza. Israel has not eliminated Hamas nor has it obliterated any other resistance forces or liberation movements that seek to break the hold of the occupation. Israel has achieved nothing through its use of excessive military force; through its killing; through its destruction of Gaza.

Yet, at the same time, Hamas alone has not been able to prevent Israel from deepening the roots of the occupation, nor has it been able to prevent it from continuing its violence and killings.

What will result from this aggression is that Israel will soon realise that the limits of its power are defined clearly, and that while basic rockets do not kill human beings they do kill the strategic vision on which Israel has based its understanding of security and politics. To this effect, the fatal trinity that is imposed on the Palestinians ‑ the siege of Gaza, the apartheid wall and Israel's security coordination with the Palestinian Authority ‑ is what afforded the Zionist entity the opportunity to impose a relatively "soft occupation", and this is precisely what Hamas's rockets have threatened.

Indeed, what Hamas has killed is Israel's conviction that it is able to impose a state of occupation without a physical occupier via this trinity. It has facilitated the stability of Israel's grip on occupied Palestinian territory for the past ten years.

Recent resistance efforts have revived the concept of the Palestinians as an occupied people within the Israeli conscience. This notion has been largely absent from both Israeli reality and mentality. The resistance in Palestine reminds Israel that there is an occupation in place, which is something that it wants to forget so that it can live in security and stability without acknowledging that it is an occupier.

The aggression will eventually be stopped by a state that does nothing more than enforce the status quo through a series of crimes against the Palestinian people. Moreover, the rockets will also stop and both sides will have to sit and re-evaluate their position and the rules of the game that have been shaken in the recent aggression and resistance operations.

In the light of the Arab region's and international community's complicit silence, and the lack of any official and concrete action on the part of the Palestinian leadership, Israel will argue that it has been given the green light to prepare for the next round of aggression, repressive policies and practices, and death and destruction.

In order to bring a complete and final end to the possibility that Israel will maintain and deepen its occupation, and to dismantle the fatal trinity of the siege, the wall and security coordination, we, the Palestinians, must also end our own fatal trinity: coordination, negotiations and separation. We have to abandon this other trinity and declare our intention to continue popular resistance in lieu of security coordination; isolate Israel as opposed to negotiating with it; and insist on our unity instead of fragmentation.

top