Palestinian despair at Olmert’s talk of peace

Ehud Olmert's bold declaration on Sunday that a peace deal with the Palestinians was "closer than ever" rings hollow among the oppressed Palestinian communities of the West Bank. As Olmert made his upbeat speech in Paris, 5,000 residents of the town of Nilin were still contemplating life under military curfew for much of the previous week, as punishment for their protests against the separation wall being constructed by the Israelis on their land.

The wall, which was built as a response to the wave of terrorist attacks in 2002, snakes its way across the Occupied Territories, annexing vast swathes of Palestinian land and water reserves. Around 75 per cent of the barrier has been completed to date and, despite the talk of peace, there is no prospect of the project being halted.

The people's protest in Nilin was to mark the fourth anniversary of the International Court of Justice declaration - known here as the 'so-called Hague Ruling' - that the construction of the wall was illegal. Israel thumbed its nose at the court and went ahead regardless.
 
Last week's curfew in Nilin has been condemned as 'collective punishment' by local activists and human rights groups, and the behaviour of the Israel Defence Forces during the shutdown denounced as immoral.

The trail of destruction left by Israeli troops is evident across the length of the town: hulls of burned out cars litter the roadside, buildings are peppered with bullet-holes and ransacked houses bear the scars of a fierce incursion by the troops.

"Look what they did to me," screams an elderly grandmother, hoisting up her robes to display the raw wounds inflicted by soldiers who, she says, threw her against a stone wall during a raid. Several other residents were hospitalised with gunshot wounds.
 
The people of Nilin have been at the centre of a long, and often violent, struggle against the annexation of farmland by the Israeli military, and their plight is typical of the worst oppression suffered by Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

Moayed Mesleh, who lives in the town, believes the main reason the Israeli public let the authorities treat the Palestinians so heavy-handedly is ignorance of the true situation in the Occupied Territories, for which he blames apathy on the part of the Israeli press.

"There is no way to change the army, but the public's opinion can be changed," he said. "Israelis think that we're all terrorists. But the media know the truth; they know us as people. They come to our homes, and we are not strange to them. We need them to take this message to ordinary Israelis in order to influence them. The only reason Israelis vote in the worst governments is because of what they are fed on their televisions."

The villagers' scepticism at the Israeli government's latest peace-making overtures is echoed by Angela Godfrey-Goldstein of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

"Olmert is not fulfilling any of the promises made during the Annapolis Conference," she told The First Post. "The Israeli settlements [in the West Bank] are still being expanded on an almost daily basis; the restriction on Palestinians' movement is as rigid as ever; and the core issues are being completely ignored, such as sovereignty over Jerusalem and the refugees' right of return. It's no wonder that from a Palestinian point of view, at present they feel no closer to peace."

The suspicion, of course, is that the Israeli tactics - from the tear-gas used on the Nilin protestors, to putting the frighteners on an elderly grandmother - are designed to drive away the Palestinians, leaving the field open for more Israeli settlers to take their place.

But this plays into the hands of the Palestinian extremists who are not prepared to sit back and watch their communities collapse. And so the cycle of violence turns again, whatever Ehud Olmert may say. ·