Comment: A new Palestinian strategy is desperately needed – Gulf Digital News

Comment: A new Palestinian strategy is desperately needed – Gulf Digital News

A terrible and tragic drama is playing out across Israel/Palestine — a dance of death with Israelis and Palestinians each engaged in their own form of destructive violence.

If we should have learned anything from this conflict, it is that just as Palestinian violence has not ended the Israeli occupation or its repression, nor has more Israeli repression or violence ended the Palestinians’ resistance to the occupation.

If anything, the violence has produced the opposite. The occupation has intensified, and Israeli politics have become so hardline that a governing coalition inclined to act with justice toward Palestinians is impossible to imagine.

The brutality and acquisitiveness of the occupation has hardened Palestinian attitudes, strengthened extremist currents, and driven violent acts of desperation.

But it continues, with no lessons learned and the behaviours of both sides playing into the fears of the other, setting the stage for yet another round of anger, revenge, and violence.

During the second intifada, I warned that because violence was a dead end (literally), a new strategy was needed — to define a goal and then develop tactics to achieve it. I understood that Palestinian anger was real and justified. \

But revenge is not a strategy. It might make some feel momentary