Opinion/Editorial

It is extremely hard to write this morning, and yet I feel I have to. Everything hurts so much. After a few hours sleep, I woke up in the dark, hoping and praying that I had woken up from a nightmare. The nightmare is still there.

I arrived in New York City on Friday night, three days after the disaster. I drove all day from Chicago with a friend.

There must be a commitment on the part of the Palestinian leadership to conduct the struggle by the same principles they say they want to live by — full respect for human rights, and full freedom of speech and political participation. If the Palestinians can do this, the sacrifices so many people made in the past year will not have been in vain and they will build an unstoppable movement for freedom and justice that no Israeli government will have any excuse or power to resist.

What is needed for Palestinians, as well as the rest of the Arab and Muslim world, to start to see the positive elements of U.S. policy is a much clearer articulation that the U.S. stands behind not just some form of Palestinian ‘statehood’ but a complete end to Israel’s occupation in all its forms.

Al Jazeera represents the best trends of openness and democratization in the Arab world. It is a long-overdue two-way street in the global flow of information and opinion. It should be celebrated and encouraged, not smeared or censored.

Being ignorant of this ongoing war that we are helping Israel to carry out is not merely a matter of our neglect. With weapons we supply, Israel kills in our name. Now that we are understanding to new levels the meaning of collective national suffering, it is finally time that we address those instances where we have not just permitted, but actually aided and abetted that same suffering around the world.

If the situation in the occupied territories caused by Israel’s relentless aggression against the Palestinians living there were not so dreadful, the Sharon-Peres discussions would form the basis for a hilarious and twisted satire. Instead, they are a marker of how far Israel’s political class is from recognising the depth of the crisis they have created and what they need to do to end it.

Your recognition that “Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been the defining reality of Palestinians’ lives there for over three decades, longer than most of the Palestinians living there have been alive,” makes plain the continued causes of this conflict.

The mirage of positive movement in the deadly gridlock between Israelis and Palestinians continued today, uninterrupted by reality.

I wonder why I am so rarely asked by the same media how I feel when Palestinians are killed. No one asked how I felt last week when five Palestinian schoolboys were killed by a bomb planted by the Israeli occupation forces in their refugee camp in Gaza.