Middle Eastern Predicitons

Arab Spring

This is my 42^nd blog post.

42 – The meaning of life.

Significant in a time in my life where I have chosen to abandon exploring the ‘why’:

-Why are we here?

-Why do I care?

-Why do I need to keep my elbows off the table when I eat?  

And focus more on the ‘what’;  

-What should I do today?

-What should I have for the lunch?

-WTF?

etc.

Distractions. It’s all about the distractions.

One perfect distraction is the upcoming UN delegation and subsequent impending doom on the State I now call home!  

I decided to do a bit of field work and find out what the people of this tiny land actually think is going to go down on that momentous day.

It seems that at most 2 million Palestinian refugees residing in Syria will march toward the Israeli border, partly because they want to reclaim the land of their ancestors, and partly because the Syrian government with mow them down with machine guns.

At least we might see a bit of colourless fireworks near the security fence along the 1967 armistice line.

Most people in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv will wake up as usual, go to their favourite, or most convenient, café and order their usual.

I think there’ll be unrest which could turn violent.

There might be a little fire. There may not. It could go either way. I think it’ll stop/pause some of the internal protests regarding social justice. Sorry for being vague, it’s the nature of my generation. 

SHAKAKI!

"הפלשתינאים ביקשו יפה מדינה. קיבלו? זיבּי קיבלו. עברו להתפוצץ על ילדים באותובוסים, פתאום התחילו להקשיב להם"

“The Palestinians asked nicely for a State. Did they get one? They got babkas. They moved on to blowing up children on buses, suddenly we started paying attention to them”

-          Etgar Keret - Suddenly, a Knock at the Door, 2010 (My translation)

Last week I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Khalil Shakaki, the #1 Palestinian pollster, speak. It was really refreshing hearing a summary of the conflict from an academic grassroots perspective, as opposed to an emotional irrational lecture littered with remarks containing vocabulary from another people’s suffering. i.e. “The Israeli Holocaust Apartheid Regime, inflicting a Hiroshima-like barrage of bombs on the Palestinians. Israel is building a slave trade out of their babies, tsunami, Stalin, 9/11, Satan, bad men…”

I feel it necessary to mention that Prof. Shakaki’s brother was head of Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Israel may or may not have assassinated him. Despite this Khalil was quite a moderate speaker.

The topic of his talk was on “Palestinian Domestic Politics and the Peace Process” focusing on number of subject areas but basing his opinions in statistic he gathered from the residents of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

I will try to attach the slides to his presentation but the main fact which interested me was the differenced statistically of the perception of one another’s intentions.

The amount of surveyed Palestinians who support a two state solution where Israel lives side by side with them as two separate states, each having autonomy of their own territories with the right to defence and economic freedoms was 62%! A fantastic majority.



I hade the breakdown of these stats if someone is interested

Of course I’m not so naïve as think that if half of Jerusalem is handed over to the current governments of the Palestinian territories along with the West Bank and all the Israeli settlements within it, that peace will come to our doorstep on the wings of a dove riding a rainbow like a teenager dizzy on acid.

But the most interesting part was the surveyed Palestinian’s perception of Israel’s goals. Only 15.7% perceive Israel as wanting to resolve the conflict.

On the Israelis side the perception of how many Palestinians want a two state solution is less.