The Occupation and it's Resistance
by Thomas
Free_Palestine_Now@hotmail.com
http://www.studentorg.vcu.edu/fpn

     Most proponents of Zionism, and supporters of Israel in general always attempt to justify their racist settlements and continued oppression of the Palestinian people by pointing to the Palestinian resistance fighters and labeling them as terrorist obstacles to peace.  What the Zionists fail to realize, or deliberately ignore is the root cause for a Palestinian resistance movement, the illegal occupation.  Palestinian peoples, promised a state under the UN partition plan of Palestine, have been expelled from their lands inside Israel proper since the inter-war years and have, since 1967, seen the last fraction of the land that should have been their state be occupied by direct and brutal Israeli military control.  In addition they have watched the Israeli government actively support and defend illegal Jewish-only settlements within the occupied territories, and have seen thousands of their children, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters murdered by the Israeli military.  What breeds resistance? It's the occupation; plain and simple.  Every day the Palestinians face Israeli racism in the form of checkpoints, brutal soldiers, and random arrests.  Every day the Palestinians see their infrastructure, schools, hospitals, houses and stores destroyed by Israelis who want to force them to leave their lands.  Every day Palestinians see the continued stream of Israeli settlers and the brutal soldiers "defending" them, soldiers who have no problem with putting a bullet through a child's head, or firing a tank shell at a car with a pregnant woman trying to get to the hospital.  The goal of the Israeli government since the start of the occupation has been to make life so miserable for the Palestinian peoples that they leave and make room for more Israeli settlers.  But the Palestinian people are a brave and determined people.  For more than 50 years they have been expelled, chased, and murdered by the Israelis, but they have continued to fight, they have continued to resist.  Israel and its illegal, racist occupation of Palestine is the cause of the bloodshed in the Middle East.  When you trap a person, regulate his movements, dehumanize him, offer him no quality of life, occupy his lands, and murder his family and friends you have bred a fighter, someone who will bravely give his life for the lives of his people.  Israel has directly bred a whole nation of fighters, a people who will not back down in the face of continued Israeli terror.  In recent times the occupation has become so brutal, and the outlook so bleak that some Palestinians have resorted to the last recourse for resistance they have left, their own bodies.  Israel claims that suicide bombers are "brainwashed" into their acts, but this is just because they know that they have created these suicide bombers, and are too racist and arrogant to admit it.    If Israel ends the occupation and give the Palestinian peoples their freedom and their state, then they can end the bloodshed on both sides.  Peace comes through the end of the occupation, not before.