There are more than one truths depending on the interests and positions of the people who have conflicting needs and views. This difference narrows down the number of the truths to one because the contending sides believe that the gain of one side is their loss. So their energies that should be spent for cultivating the conditions of coexistence is often spent on co-extinction. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a clear example of misjudgements and missed opportunities.

When the chance of creating of a dual state in the late forties was missed, history evolved in favour of the Jews who yearned for a homeland more than any other time after WW 2 that brought death and destruction to all but mostly them. Their quest for statehood that deny now for the Palestinians were supported by the West acting out of a guilty conscience for committing the unforgivable crimes against humanity, the Jews being the foremost victims. Their rivals, the Arabs, were disunited and ignored by the greater powers of the day as they are today.

Since the inception of Israel in 1948, the Jewish state expanded its territory illegally and ousted the indigenous people living on it, oppressing and marginalized the remaining.

Every attempt of those ousted and every imitative of the oppressed to seek justice and basic human rights were denied and brutally repelled. This unequal and unjust relationship was protested at the United Nations with nearly a hundred Security Council resolutions. They all called on Israel either to withdraw from the occupied territories or to stop illegal settlements or to stop atrocities that mostly came in the form of disproportionate retaliations. One such over-extended response is the Gaza blockade, established in the summer of 2007. Ever since every security breach attributed to Hamas or its failure to contain other militia groups has been in the form of collective punishment that violates Article 33 of the Fourth 1949 Geneva Convention. This article lays down the rules for the “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.”
Is Israel in a state of war with the Palestinians or is it vice versa? The blockade has turned Gaza into a ghetto which should reminds painful past that they had suffered through. Now the Jewish made ghetto inflicts deep scars in the Arab psyche that breeds the future enemies of Israel.
Economically Israel has devastated the Palestinian economy. Only 5% of the industrial plants in Gaza are operational and they work less than half of their capacity. Gaza borders on the Mediterranean but its fishers are not allowed to out to sea more than three miles without being shot at. Israeli government has seized 35 percent of the agricultural land in Gaza to build a buffer zone. Most of the aquifers are confiscated as well denying the Palestinians their water resources and a steady supply of water. The infrastructure is devastated. Eighty percent of all Gazans have come to rely on food coming in as aid. All of these are done in the name of Israel’s security. However, what is ‘defense’ for Israel is death, destruction and oppression for the ‘other’ people, in and around Israel.
Allow me to leave the explanation of the de facto situation in Gaza to Naom Chomsky and his international colleagues in the “Stop the War Coalition” published on15 November 2012: (http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/palestine-and-israel/2027-who-is-doing-the-killing-in-gaza-noam-chomsky-and-others-challenge-the-worlds-media)

“…Israel [i]s targeting civilians…The fact that casualties have overwhelmingly been civilians indicates that Israel is not so much engaged in "targeted" killings, as in "collective" killings, thus once again committing the crime of collective punishment…


News skewed reporting, and …manipulation of the readership... consistently report that Israeli operations are in response to rockets from Gaza and to the injuring of Israeli soldiers. However, the chronology of events of the recent flare-up began on November 5… [as]… part of a chain of events where Gazan civilians had been killed… Apparently such scenes are not newsworthy for the New York Times, the CBC, or the BBC. Bias and dishonesty with respect to the oppression of Palestinians is nothing new in Western media and has been widely documented. Nevertheless, Israel continues its crimes against humanity with full acquiescence and financial, military and moral support from our governments, the U.S., Canada and the EU.
Netanyahu is currently garnering Western diplomatic support for additional operations in Gaza, which makes us worry that another Cast Lead may be on the horizon.”
Well it is comforting to see people with conscience both in the West and within Israel to prove that basic human values are still living where politics see no moral dilemma in killing.


Prof. Dr. Doğu Ergil is a Professor of political Science in Fatih University \ Turkey, and also an expert on the Kurdish Question, and he is one of the well-known authors in Turkey.