Thursday, June 17, 2010

Israel's illegal construction in and around Gaza

Of Talks

The world community needs to pull its act together to put pressure primarily on Israel to back off from its proceedings on the new constructions in the disputed territories

Sheikh Anjum Husain

The Obama administration seems to have woken up to its long overdue promise of reaching out to the Muslim world by showing its anger at Israel continuation with its settlement projects in and around East Jerusalem. An expression of this unhappiness over Israel Premier Netanyahu’s remark that he will not block the construction projects was George Mitchell, US envoy to West Asia, cancelling his visit to the Jewish state. The crisis has proved to be a setback to the peace talks between the two neighbours with US playing the role of a mediator. This new US-Israel frustration elicited a bitter response from no other than the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton calling it an “insult” on part of Israel. Nevertheless, all this is just a semblance of what an aggressive state like Israel deserves given its track record of breaching international laws and treaties. Israel has in fact been a pampered child of the US with successive governments extending full support to its reprehensible behaviour and endorsing its suppressive tactics. When a country like Iran, which time and again states that it needs uranium enrichment to meet its civilian energy requirements, has been facing economic sanctions for so long, why play a double-standard policy with Israel? Why doesn’t US raise economic and military barricades viz-a-viz an international criminal state? The world community needs to pull its act together to put pressure primarily on Israel to back off from its proceedings on the new constructions in the disputed territories. Both the warring neighbours must be brought on the talking table to settle the dispute once and for all. The United Nations especially has a role to play and that’s what it is meant for.

Like Kashmiris, the people of Palestine have been suffering for decades bearing the brunt of sins they didn’t commit. In a leading daily of J&K India, Pakistan and Kashmir were aptly described as three idiots drawing the analogy from Amir Khan starrer movie “3 idiots”. India and Pakistan resumed the so called dialogue (dialogue or a mock talk?) last month after the ill-fated 26/11 to the pleasure of optimists.


India again has worn the delaying tactics mask and subjected the resumption of composite dialogue to the condition that Pakistan, the biggest terror victim at present, first takes care of India’s concerns of terror. Thus creating a lose-lose-lose scenario for all the three idiots! This continuing strain in Indo-Pak relations and will prove to be detrimental to peace in the region in the long run as it would egg terrorists on and they will construe it as a success of their evil designs. India has its economic might and a rising superpower status at stake while Pakistan has everything from the lives of its citizens, its economy and the already explosive polity at stake. And as for Kashmir (J&K), young boys who only might have dreamt of a career, a successful life et al continue to fall victims to bullets and unceremoniously enter graveyards when they should be attending schools and colleges.

Feedback at anjum.valley@gmail.com

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