Financial Blackmail

By Marwan Arikat
Alliance For Free Palestine
Editor/ Opinion Writer

I am not surprised by the latest Israeli method of collective punishment toward the Palestinians, especially after the majority of the Palestinians democratically elected a government that refuses to recognize the Israeli regime or give up the armed struggle against it until the Jewish state ends its vicious and illegal occupation of all the Palestinian territories and recognizes the Palestinians right to live in freedom and dignity. Israel has been employing every brutal tactic known to man against the Palestinians, in order to force them into submission, for the last 58 years and it never succeeded and now Israel thinks that it can starve the Palestinians into submission. The Israeli brutality is never shocking, because it is an occupying country and an apartheid state. What is really appalling to witness, are the Western democracies jumping on the Israeli wagon and punishing the Palestinians for their democratic choice by cutting off all the US and the European aid to the Palestinian people who are badly beaten and weakened by the Israeli occupation. In addition, the West is placing the entire burden on the Palestinian people by requiring them to renounce “violence” if they want to receive foreign aid, which means that the people who live under occupation are not allowed to fight back against the aggressor and the occupier. Thus the West is stripping the Palestinians of their human and international right of armed struggle against occupation which is recognized by the U.N. General Assembly. It is time for the US and the European Union to stop looking at the Middle East conflict through Israeli binoculars and start applying an evenhanded policy with all the parties involved in the conflict because this is the only way toward a just and an everlasting peace.