Palestinians’ everyday struggle to get back control of their territories

Palestinians’ everyday struggle to get back control of their territories For more than seventy years, daily life for Palestinian Arabs has been about the struggle to take back their land, and their destiny, from Israel. Even though the 1948 United Nations plan for the partition of Palestine did give them their own state, they have never been fully independent. While some countries do recognise Palestine’s Statehood, many do not. Currently, it has non-member ’observer status’ at the UN; implicit recognition of a kind, but it falls far short of full sovereignty. Crucially, Palestine, and by extension, its population, is divided into two separate areas; Gaza and the West Bank. Illegal Israeli settlements have chipped away at their territorial integrity. Many Palestinians are refugees: they live in supposedly temporary camps while awaiting the opportunity to return to the homes they fled. Israeli control dominates every aspect of daily Palestinian life. Israel decides who and what enters and leaves their settlements. Palestinian police officers are required to remove their uniforms and conceal the car’s signal lights when they leave a settlement. Take a look back at the historical events that led to the present stalemate. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government promised the Jewish people a homeland, thereby giving them a political foothold in the region. That was followed by a string of Arab-Israeli wars that allowed Israel to seize ever more Palestinian territory. The rise of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation later put Palestine’s dreams of statehood firmly back on the international agenda. Palestinians may be hemmed in by Israel in their daily lives, but they still find all sorts of ways to resist. Palestinian Authority leaders in Ramallah speak of their ultimate dream of taking back Jerusalem, while in Gaza, medics tend the wounded at the weekly ’March of Return’ protest. Join Military Wave Источник: Military Wave