Published in Issue #3 of The Bathroom
Following several highly publicized hijackings, public sentiment really started to change in 1972, when thirteen Israeli athletes were taken hostage and eventually killed by Palestinian soldiers during the Summer Olympics.
The world was shocked: What message were the Palestinians trying to deliver to the world with this seemingly gruesome act? Had there been some injustice, some unaddressed grievance that had slipped through the public consciousness? Reporters became obsessed trying to decode “the message.” Scholars began writing extensively on the military occupation of Palestine by Israel, the building of illegal Israeli settlements, the flaunting of UN resolutions by the Israeli government. Soon the world was outraged that this new nation of Israel, not even one generation old, seemed committed to a path of racist policies and military domination. News stories reported land seizures, razed Palestinian villages, massacres of those Palestinians who hadn’t fled and become political refugees. With the Holocaust still fresh in the world’s collective memory, the question on everyone’s lips was: How could people who were so recently victims themselves become the new oppressors?
By 1973 public sentiment had fully embraced the plight of the Palestinians. In April of that year President Nixon traveled to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian president Yasser Arafat in his presidential compound. “We have no partner for negotiation,” Arafat explained to the US audiences. “We have been under an illegal Israeli occupation since 1967.”
Within six months UN sanctions were placed against Israel. The Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt, the Golan Heights to Lebanon. President Anwar Sadat, the last of Israel’s needed allies, publicly denounced the policies of Israel. This denouncement was followed by several European countries and finally the U.S. The United Nations gave Israel 90 days with which to comply with all UN resolutions, including Resolution 242, which mandated that Israel relinquish all land seized in the 1967 war and negotiate for the right of return of all Palestinian refugees.
At midnight on the 91st day, May 24, 1975, the new state of Palsrael was created. Politically the new state would be controlled by the Palestinian Party (PP). All former Israel citizens would be relocated to refugee camps between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Palestinian refugees and even other Arabs with Palestinian blood would be welcomed as citizens in the new state; those Palestinians who wanted to live in the newly built settlements would also be given monetary incentives. Newly paved Palestinian-only roads would connect the Palestinian settlements. Israelis in the refugee camps were taxed heavily in order to pay reparations to the Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians and Egyptians.
Thirteen years later, in 1987, a young rabbi from Tel Aviv Refugee Camp by the name of Josef Goldburg, disguised in the black and white kuffiyah of the PP, gained entrance into a mosque during Friday services. Around his waist were strapped 80 pounds of explosives that he detonated during the middle of evening adorations. Fifty-seven people were killed; their deaths dominated the headlines. The Palestinians retaliated by invading all the Israeli refugee camps with tanks and military helicopters, killing thousands, bulldozing houses to the ground. There were never any official body counts, nor did anyone demand them.
While some people hailed the suicide bombing and Goldburg as an Israeli freedom fighter, daring to resist the decades-long repression by Palestinians, most public sentiment was further hardened against Israeli terrorists and allowances jumped to an all-time permissive high. Palestinians issued ID cards to the Israelis, raided their houses with no provocation, took their men to prison without charges and tortured them indefinitely. The U.S. loaned the PP 9 billion dollars for the construction of a 25-foot high iron and barbed wire “security fence” to encircle the Israeli refugee camps. Checkpoints in and out of the Israeli-occupied areas were manned by Palestinian soldiers armed with US weapons for ensuring their safety against hostile Israeli terrorists.
At this same time the new prime minister of Palsrael was called a “man of peace” and featured on the cover of Time with an olive branch in his mouth.
Published in Issue #3 of The Bathroom
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